The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my hand against some hard door to call myself back to the body.’

There is nothing staid, nothing settled in this universe. All is rippling, all is dancing; all is quickness and triumph.

then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.

To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.

Because you have an end in view – one person, is it, to sit beside, an idea is it, your beauty is it? I do not know – your days and hours pass like the boughs of forest trees and the smooth green of forest rides to a hound running on the scent. But there is no single scent, no single body for me to follow. And I have no face. I am like the foam that races over the beach or the moonlight that falls arrowlike here on a tin can, here on a spike of the mailed sea holly; or a bone or a half-eaten boat. I am whirled down caverns, and flap like paper against endless corridors, and must press my hand against the wall to draw myself back.

One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.

All were dressed in indeterminate shades of grey and brown, never even a blue feather pinned to a hat. None had the courage to be one thing rather than another. What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day,

Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of note-paper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably.

Thus he directed me to that which is beyond and outside our own predicament; to that which is symbolic, and thus perhaps permanent, if there is any permanence in our sleeping, eating, breathing, so animal, so spiritual and tumultuous lives.

buried match after match in the turf decidedly to make this or that stage in the process of understanding (it might be philosophy; science; it might be myself) while

was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

There was no past, no future; merely the moment in its ring of light, and our bodies; and the inevitable climax, the ecstasy.

rose and walked away – I, I, I; not Byron, Shelley, Dostoevsky, but I, Bernard. I even repeated my own name once or twice.

‘The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst.

We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float. .

‘Life is pleasant. Life is good. The mere process of life is satisfactory.

“Heaven be praised,” I said, “we need not whip this prose into poetry. The little language is enough.”

I saw the first morning he would never see

satiety and doom; the sense of what is unescapable in our lot; death; the knowledge of limitations; how life is more obdurate than one had thought it.

We saw for a moment laid out among us the body of the complete human being whom we have failed to be, but at the same time, cannot forget.

But we – against the brick, against the branches, we six, out of how many million millions, for one moment out of what measureless abundance of past time and time to come, burnt there triumphant.

‘The woods had vanished; the earth was a waste of shadow. No sound broke the silence of the wintry land scape. No cock crowed; no smoke rose; no train moved. A man without a self; I said. A heavy body leaning on a gate. A dead man.

vain. I, carrying a notebook, making phrases, had recorded mere changes; a shadow, I had been sedulous to take note of shadows. How can I proceed now, I said, without a self; weightless and visionless, through a world weightless, without illusion?

‘How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar.

does not matter whom I meet. All this little affair of ‘being’ is over. Who this is I do not know; nor care; we will dine together.”