The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as a cloth had wrinkles in it.

‘I burn, I shiver,’ said Jinny, ‘out of this sun, into this shadow.’

I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, “I am alone.”

‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

I am tied down with single words.

My roots are threaded, like fibres in a flowerpot, round and round about the world.

Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it, and I myself am outside the loop; which I now join – so – and seal up, and make entire. The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, “Oh, save me from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!”’

Let us inhabit the underworld. Let us take possession of our secret territory, which is lit by pendant currants like candelabra, shining red on one side, black on the other.

We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.’

But we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass.

Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.’

Everything became softly amorphous, as if the china of the plate flowed and the steel of the knife were liquid.

I love tremendous and sonorous words. But his words are too hearty to be true.

for Bernard is a dangling wire, loose, but seductive. Yes, for when he talks, when he makes his foolish comparisons, a lightness comes over one. One floats, too, as if one were that bubble; one is freed; I have escaped, one feels.

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then – our friends are not able to finish their stories.’

I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its image. You are dead now, I say, school day, hated day.

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

I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life. Yet I could not live with him and suffer his stupidity.

He is shaded with innumerable perplexities,

But stories that follow people into their private rooms are difficult.

But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves.

I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them – Oh! to whom?’

Blessings be on all traditions, on all safeguards and circumscriptions!

My eyes are wild; my lips tight pressed. The bird flies: the flower dances; but I hear always the sullen thud of the waves; and the chained beast stamps on the beach. It stamps and stamps.’

Those who have despised me shall acknowledge my sovereignty.

I open my body, I shut my body at my will. Life is beginning. I now break into my hoard of life.’

With intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger, life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea. It is to this we are attached; it is to this we are bound, as bodies to wild horses.

I do not believe in separation. We are not single.

‘The fact is that I have little aptitude for reflection. I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world.

A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude. They require some final refrigeration which I cannot give them, dabbling always in warm soluble words.

I have no power of ingratiating myself. I do not admire that man; he does not admire me. Let me at least be honest. Let me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world; these horse-hair seats; these coloured photographs of piers and parades. I could shriek aloud at the smug self-satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral ornaments hanging from their watch-chains.

There is that in me which will consume them entirely.

They do not understand that I have to effect different transitions; have to cover the entrances and exits of several different men who alternately act their parts as Bernard.

Now people who make a single impression, and that, in the main, a good one (for there seems to be a virtue in simplicity), are those who keep their equilibrium in midstream.

It is the speed, the hot, molten effect, the laval flow of sentence into sentence that I need.

‘The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. Some blind flaps in my eyes. Everything becomes impervious. I cease to invent.

Words and words and words, how they gallop – how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me – some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity.

I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.

I am astonished, as I draw the veil off things with words, how much, how infinitely more than I can say, I have observed.

I would rather be loved, I would rather be famous than follow perfection through the sand.

(We use our friends to measure our own stature.)

This is the momentary pause; the dark moment. The fiddlers have lifted their bows.

I am admitted to the warmth and privacy of another soul.

Tongues with their whips are upon me.

There is, then, a world immune from change.

am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea.

We insist, it seems, on living.

I need

These are fantastic pictures – these are figments, these visions of friends in absence, grotesque, dropsical, vanishing at the first touch of the toe of a real boot.

We are for ever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come?