To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

Try, she suggests, to write on ‘some event that has left a distinct impression on you’, when ‘a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment’. As soon as you attempt to ‘reconstruct’ it in words, you will find that it ‘breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions’.

The Ramsays are Victorian philanthropists – they think of the servants or the fishermen as individuals, not as a class, and Mr Ramsay (like Scott) admires and envies their simplicity.

life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks4 founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

with his acid way of peeling the flesh and blood off everything, he was not satisfied.

Under the influence of that extraordinary emotion which had been growing all the walk, had begun in the garden when he had wanted to take her bag, had increased in the town when he had wanted to tell her everything about himself, he was coming to see himself and everything he had ever known gone crooked a little. It was awfully strange.

One could not say what one meant.