The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and ever lasting road.

We deserve then to be tripped by molehills. We are infinitely abject, shuffling past with our eyes shut.

Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.’

How strange to oar one’s way through crowds seeing life through hollow eyes, burning eyes.

Curiosity is knocked out only for a short time. One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.

Thus I expunge certain stains, and erase old defilements;

The weight of the world is on our shoulders; its vision is through our eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflict on the world the injury of some obliquity.

‘Percival has died (he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are one death).

And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea.

‘It is curious how, at every crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue – the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook.

This drop falling is time tapering to a point. Time, which is a sunny pasture covered with a dancing light, time, which is widespread as a field at midday, becomes pendant. Time tapers to a point. As a drop falls from a glass heavy with some sediment, time falls.

‘The truth is that I am not one of those who find their satisfaction in one person, or in infinity. The private room bores me, also the sky. My being only glitters when all its facets are exposed to many people.

(But still a few stars fall through my night, beautifully, from the violence of that concussion.)

One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep;

There is always somebody, when we come together, and the edges of meeting are still sharp, who refuses to be submerged; whose identity therefore one wishes to make crouch beneath one’s own.

We are all swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shade; we make no comparisons; think scarcely ever of I or of you; and in this unconsciousness attain the utmost freedom from friction and part the weeds that grow over the mouths of sunken channels.

I am wedged into my place in the puzzle.

I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines.

I have a little dagger of contempt and severity hidden up my sleeve.

My philosophy, always accumulating, welling up moment by moment, runs like quicksilver a dozen ways at once.

I reflect now that the earth is only a pebble flicked off accidentally from the face of the sun and that there is no life anywhere in the abysses of space.’

‘Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos,’ said Neville, ‘this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars.

Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust?

Our lives too stream away, down the unlighted avenues, past the strip of time, unidentified.

‘Time’s fangs have ceased their devouring.

‘I hold firmly to this hand, anyone’s, with love, with hatred; it does not matter which.’

people in authority always become melodramatic

He had the kind of beauty which defends itself from any caress.

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

How impossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give the effect of the whole – again like music. What a symphony with its concord and its discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath, then grew up! Each played his own tune, fiddle, flute, trumpet, drum or whatever the instrument might be.

The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth.

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

What torments one is the horrible activity of the mind’s eye

And she, remembering other things, to me trifles but torturing to her, showed me how life withers when there are things we cannot share.

All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I go to my friends, I to my own heart, I to seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken

Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to sell it.

It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together – this is the daily battle, defeat or victory, the absorbing pursuit.

‘It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.

Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known – it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call “my life”, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am – Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.

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. All that we might have been we saw; all that we had missed, and we grudged for a moment the other’s claim, as children when the cake is cut, the one cake, the only cake, watch their slice diminishing.

The moment was all; the moment was enough. And then Neville, Jinny, Susan and I, as a wave breaks, burst asunder, surrendered – to the next leaf, to the precise bird, to a child with a hoop, to a prancing dog, to the warmth that is hoarded in woods after a hot day, to the lights twisted like white ribbon on rippled waters.

For this is not one life; nor do I always know If I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda – so strange is the contact of one with another.

‘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.

‘Lord, how unutterably disgusting life is! What dirty tricks it plays us, one moment free; the next this.

‘It is strange that we, who are capable of so much suffering, should inflict so much suffering.

Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.