Virginia Woolf: Complete Works (OBG Classics): Inspired 'A Ghost Story' (2017) directed by David Lowery

by Virginia Woolf

Lars Porsena

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Euphrosyne is a Goddess of Good Cheer, Joy and Mirth, and the incarnation of grace and beauty.

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀν- θρώπου δεινότερον πέλει. τοῦτο καὶ πολιοῦ πέραν πόντου χειμερίῳ νότῳ χωρεῖ, περιβρυχίοισιν περῶν ὑπ’ οἴδμασιν

Sophocles, Antigone Many things are formidable, and none more formidable than man! He crosses the gray sea beneath the winter wind, passing beneath the surges that surround him; and he wears away the highest of the gods, Earth, immortal and unwearying, as his ploughs go back and forth from year to year, turning the soil with the aid of the breed of horses.

It’s the philosophers, it’s the scholars,” he continued, “they’re the people who pass the torch, who keep the light burning by which we live. Being a politician doesn’t necessarily blind one to that, Mrs. Ambrose.” “No. Why should it?” said Helen. “But can you remember if your wife takes sugar?”

Santa Marina

I speak as one who plumbs Life’s dim profound, One who at length can sound Clear views and certain. But—after love what comes? A scene that lours, A few sad vacant hours, And then, the Curtain.

“He abjures love” by Thomas Hardy. It has been set to music by Gerald Finzi.

Queen of Holland!

Wilhelmina

“His initials being R. S. T., we call him Monk,”

R. S. T. Haslehurst authored a number of books on Christianity and the Church of England. Some Account Of The Penitential Discipline Of The Early Church In The First Four Centuries (1921) Church of England Doctrine Part I. God and Redemption How to Read The Bible Aloud God's Purposes and Man's Accountability: a dialogue.

Garibaldi

Garibaldi was involved in revolutionary movements in Brazil and Uruguay between 1835 and 1848.

Father Damien

He won recognition for his ministry from 1873 to 1889 in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi to people with leprosy (also known as Hansen's disease), who were required to live under a government-sanctioned medical quarantine on the island of Molokaʻi on the Kalaupapa Peninsula.

ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of being fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare but treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical of the kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively protested when Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of Susan’s company where she had been used to exact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had already produced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other people.

ascribe them to the unhappy law of nature which decreed that there was only one Arthur Venning, and only one Susan who could marry him. Her theory, of course, had the merit of being fully supported by her own case. She had been vaguely uncomfortable at home for two or three years now, and a voyage like this with her selfish old aunt, who paid her fare but treated her as servant and companion in one, was typical of the kind of thing people expected of her. Directly she became engaged, Mrs. Paley behaved with instinctive respect, positively protested when Susan as usual knelt down to lace her shoes, and appeared really grateful for an hour of Susan’s company where she had been used to exact two or three as her right. She therefore foresaw a life of far greater comfort than she had been used to, and the change had already produced a great increase of warmth in her feelings towards other people.

LACUNA

“We don’t care for people because of their qualities,” he tried to explain. “It’s just them that we care for,”—he struck a match—“just that,” he said, pointing to the flames. “I see what you mean,” she said, “but I don’t agree. I do know why I care for people, and I think I’m hardly ever wrong. I see at once what they’ve got in them.

an engraving of John Stuart Mill, after the picture by Watts.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Stuart_Mill_G_F_Watts.jpg

G.F.S.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groupe_Feministe_Socialiste?wprov=sfti1

“I like walking in Richmond Park and singing to myself and knowing it doesn’t matter a damn to anybody. I like seeing things go on—as we saw you that night when you didn’t see us—I love the freedom of it—it’s like being the wind or the sea.”

And then one never knows what any one feels. We’re all in the dark. We try to find out, but can you imagine anything more ludicrous than one person’s opinion of another person? One goes along thinking one knows; but one really doesn’t know.”

“If all our rooks were blue,” he said,—he raised his glasses; he actually placed them on his nose,—“they would not live long in Wiltshire,” he concluded; he dropped his glasses to his side

Whoever you are holding me now in your hand, Without one thing all will be useless.

A poem from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The poet is identifying himself with the book the reader is holding in her hand.

Voices crying behind them never reached through the waters in which they were now sunk. The repetition of Hewet’s name in short, dissevered syllables was to them the crack of a dry branch or the laughter of a bird. The grasses and breezes sounding and murmuring all round them, they never noticed that the swishing of the grasses grew louder and louder, and did not cease with the lapse of the breeze. A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears. Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shapeless against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way and that, now seeing only forests of green, and now the high blue heaven; she was speechless and almost without sense. At last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before her by her panting. Over her loomed two great heads, the heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen. Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving; they came together and kissed in the air above her. Broken fragments of speech came down to her on the ground. She thought she heard them speak of love and then of marriage. Raising herself and sitting up, she too realised Helen’s soft body, the strong and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling and breaking in one vast wave. When this fell away, and the grasses once more lay low, and the sky became horizontal, and the earth rolled out flat on...

I wonder if the world’s changed? and if so, when it’ll stop changing, and which is the real world?”

‘It is probable that Hugh’ (he’s the hero, a literary man), ‘had not realised at the time of his marriage, any more than the young man of parts and imagination usually does realise, the nature of the gulf which separates the needs and desires of the male from the needs and desires of the female….

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence,

The Nymph of the Severn From “Comus” SPIRIT:

That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream. Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure; Whilom she was the daughter of Locrine, That had the sceptre from his father Brute.

Last line is part of quote but is typeset incorrectly into a new higher level paragraph.

Sabrina fair, Listen where thou art sitting Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave, In twisted braids of lilies knitting The loose train of thy amber dropping hair, Listen for dear honour’s sake, Goddess of the silver lake, Listen and save!

They wrestled up, they wrestled down, They wrestled sore and still: The fiend who blinds the eyes of men, That night he had his will.

A New Forest Ballad Andromeda and Other Poems — Charles Kingsley Oh she tripped over Ocknell plain, And down by Bradley Water; And the fairest maid on the forest side Was Jane, the keeper's daughter. She went and went through the broad gray lawns As down the red sun sank, And chill as the scent of a new-made grave The mist smelt cold and dank. 'A token, a token!' that fair maid cried, 'A token that bodes me sorrow; For they that smell the grave by night Will see the corpse to-morrow. 'My own true love in Burley Walk Does hunt to-night, I fear; And if he meet my father stern, His game may cost him dear. 'Ah, here's a curse on hare and grouse, A curse on hart and hind; And a health to the squire in all England, Leaves never a head behind.' Her true love shot a mighty hart Among the standing rye, When on him leapt that keeper old From the fern where he did lie. The forest laws were sharp and stern, The forest blood was keen; They lashed together for life and death Beneath the hollies green. The metal good and the walnut wood Did soon in flinders flee; They tost the orts to south and north, And grappled knee to knee. They wrestled up, they wrestled down, They wrestled still and sore; Beneath their feet the myrtle sweet Was stamped to mud and gore. Ah, cold pale moon, thou cruel pale moon, That starest with never a frown On all the grim and the ghastly things That are wrought in thorpe and town: And yet, cold pale moon, thou cruel pale moon, That night hadst never the grace To lighten two dying Christian men To see one another's face. They wrestled up, they wrestled down, They wrestled sore and still, The fiend who blinds the eyes of men That night he had his will. Like stags full spent, among the bent They dropped a while to rest; When the young man drove his saying knife Deep in the old man's breast. The old man drove his gunstock down Upon the young man's head; And side by side, by the water brown, Those yeomen twain lay dead. They dug three graves in Lyndhurst yard; They dug them side by side; Two yeomen lie there, and a maiden fair A widow and never a bride. In the New Forest, 1847. the young knight a parable

Peor and Baalim Forsake their Temples dim, With that twice batter’d God of Palestine And mooned Astaroth—

From On the Morning of Christ's Nativity - John Milton

Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre.

great Queen herself.

Queen Elizabeth I.

At any rate, two years of this quiet country life had not passed, and Orlando had written no more perhaps than twenty tragedies and a dozen histories and a score of sonnets when a message came that he was to attend the Queen at Whitehall.

A little less than two years pass.

Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing.

The Great Frost

1708-1709

“Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gentilhomme qui vous était apparenté en Pologne l’été dernier”,

“I think I met a gentleman who was related to you in Poland last summer”

“La beauté des dames de la cour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus gracieuse que votre reine, ni une coiffure plus belle que la sienne,”

“The beauty of the ladies of the English court fills me with delight. One cannot see a lady more graceful than your queen, nor a hairstyle more beautiful than hers,”

(comme une grande perche mal fagotée)

(like a large, frumpy perch)

whimples;

wimples

Moor suffocated the woman in her bed

Othello

Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?

And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.

Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the mast-head ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon; Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer “Yes”; if we are truthful we say “No”; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.

And so, the thought of love would be all ambered over with snow and winter; with log fires burning; with Russian women, gold swords, and the bark of stags; with old King James’ slobbering and fireworks and sacks of treasure in the holds of Elizabethan sailing ships.

Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women.

In our belief, Greene’s ridicule of his tragedy hurt him as much as the Princess’ ridicule of his love.

“I’ll be blasted”, he said, “if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself”; and here he made as if he were tearing a whole budget of papers across and tossing them in the face of that sneering loose-lipped man.

We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party—for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish.

Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease. High battlements of thought, habits that had seemed durable as stone, went down like shadows at the touch of another mind and left a naked sky and fresh stars twinkling in it.

A change seemed to have come over the climate of England. Rain fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over than they began again. The sun shone, of course, but it was so girt about with clouds and the air was so saturated with water, that its beams were discoloured and purples, oranges, and reds of a dull sort took the place of the more positive landscapes of the eighteenth century. Under this bruised and sullen canopy the green of the cabbages was less intense, and the white of the snow was muddied. But what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house—damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone.