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

by Virginia Woolf

The vagueness and occasional inconsistency of Vernon Lee’s arguments seem to arise from a desire to account for things logically without defining her terms sufficiently, and at the same time to prove that they are all pieces in a Divine system which the reason cannot appreciate.

It will be remembered how, when one is reading Plato, there comes a moment, after pages of question and answer, when the constructive part of the dialogue is given us, very often in a myth or in the words of some wise woman. The device makes us realise that we are no longer arguing, but that we are listening to something beyond the reach of argument, now that we have gone as far as reason will take us.

Gorgeous nonsense.

She has read Plato and Ruskin and Pater with enthusiasm because she cares passionately for the subjects they deal with. Moreover, although we may doubt her conclusions or admit that they bewilder us, her exposition is full of ingenuity, and has often the suggestive power of brilliant talk. One may not make things more clear by talking about them, but one can infect others with the same desire.

Mr John,

Mr Shannon,

Mr Rothe...

docs

does

[The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie.

jugged venison,

Tout est perdu quand on digère mal; c’est l’estomac qui fait les heureux’—crowd

One can imagine that it makes him uneasy to sit beside books for long; he hears people talking in them, and must let them out. To do this one must get at them, see them, make them talk sense; a fascinating employment, although not without its risks. Fortunately there is generally some obstacle to prevent us from crashing through the little plank on which we stand into the immense abyss; there is the difficulty of language.

She was often lost in thought. Have snails got teeth? Do hogs have the measles? Why do dogs that rejoice swing their tails?

‘Ipse dixit,’

‘Women live like Bats or Owls, labour like Beasts, and die like Worms.’

Again it is better to be an atheist than a superstitious man.

Tombs are milestones to show us how far we have travelled along the invisible way.

You clasp a bird in your hands; it is so frightened that it lies perfectly still; yet somehow it is a living body, there is a heart in it and the breast is warm. You feel a fish on your line; the line hangs straight as before down into the sea, but there is a strain on it; it thrills and quivers. That is something like the feeling which live books give and dead ones cannot give; they strain and quiver.

Quant à moi, vous le voyez, j’ai la mise savamment negligée et la bonhomie autoritaire qui convient aux premiers serviteurs d’une démocratie. Vous êtes là pour me garnir. Je porte moi-mème ma puissance; mais c’est vous qui portez mon décorum, comme un larbin mon pardessus.

Mort de Quelqu’un;

Le Saint-Péret mousseux débarbouilla les esprits. Il accrut l’ardeur, mais en l’épurant. Les copains étaient envahis par un sentiment singulier, qui n’avait pas de nom, mais qui leur donnait des ordres, qui exigeait d’eux une satisfaction soudaine: on ne sait quoi qui ressemblait à un besoin d’unité absolue et de conscience absolue. Ils en arrivèrent à comprendre qu’ils voulaient certaines paroles, qu’ils seraient assouvis par une voix. Si plusieurs choses n’étaient pas dites, cette nuit même, il serait à jamais trop tard pour les dire. Si plusieurs choses n’étaient pas constatées et manifestées, elles seraient à jamais perdues.

But there is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season. To write down one’s impressions of Hamlet as one reads it year after year, would be virtually to record one’s own autobiography, for as we know more of life, so Shakespeare comments upon what we know.

Her characters are linked together by their passions as by a train of gunpowder.

kindling

kindly?

Certainly Mr Harris paints a very depressing picture of the great Victorians. There was George Eliot with her philosophic tea parties; and Tennyson declaiming pompously before the statues in the British Museum; and Pater with a style that Butler likened to the face of an enamelled old woman; and Arnold’s ‘odour which was as the faint sickliness of hawthorn’.

This gift Butler had in the highest degree; he gives a turn or a twist to the most ordinary matter, so that it bores its way to the depths of our minds, there to stay when more important things have crumbled to dust. If proof of this is wanted, read his account of buying new-laid eggs in The Note-books, or the story of ‘The Aunt, the Nieces, and the Dog’, or the anecdote of the old lady and her parrot in The Humour of Homer.

Two well-known writers were describing the sound of the guns in France, as they heard it from the top of the South Downs. One likened it to ‘the hammer stroke of Fate’; the other heard in it ‘the pulse of Destiny’.

‘Eyes and No-Eyes,’

From the book “Evenings at Home”

R.A.M. Stevenson,

Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, art critic and cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson.

The rooms shook with Henley’s robust roar, which drove timid spirits to seek far corners; or there was heard the ‘Ha, ha!’ of Whistler, which also made certain guests thankful that the room was provided with many doors.

And here we must make what appears to be a confession. The little shelf of books bequeathed to us by the writers of that age has always seemed the fruit of an evening time after the hot blaze of day, when swift, moth-like spirits were abroad; a time of graceful talent and thin little volumes whose authors had done with life long before they were old.

To the people who lived in them they were, mercifully enough, the one tolerable season of recorded time.

And from this artistic exclusiveness the step is very short to the worst exclusiveness of all—that which shuts itself up against youth and decries and belittles its work. The change from intense enjoyment of her own youth to disparagement of the youth of others is really surprising.

For the old, after all, are the deep mirrors of life, in whose depths we may see all the processions of the past, closely surrounded by the unknown, as the day by the darkness of night.

Thomas Gordon Hake.

Life of Carlyle

Progress and Poverty

The Vulture...

Robert E...

Diana of the Crossways

The Minister’s Wooing,

‘Mme de M...

Redemption of Edward...

William Lloyd Garrison did more than anyone to abolish slavery, yet we find ourselves, as Mrs Ponsonby points out, less inclined to admire him than to be shocked that such views should be rare enough to demand admiration.

But the struggle still continues; we find the rebel flame burning at its purest in the cry of little Ivan Tolstoy, who, when his mother told him that Yasnaya was his property, stamped his foot and cried, ‘Don’t say that Yasnaya Polyana is mine! Everything is everyone else’s’.

we build houses of a day in the valleys of death.

‘to burke’

The danger of trying to write beautifully in English lies in the ease with which it is possible to do something very like it. There are the old cadences humming in one’s head, the old phrases covering nothing so decently that it seems to be something after all. Preoccupied with the effort to be smooth, rotund, demure, and irreproachable, sentimentality slips past unnoticed, and platitudes spread themselves abroad with an air of impeccable virtue.

are not all the ends of serious middle-aged ambition ‘only things to sit on’?

Prelude.

Wordsworth

Tono-Bungay