The Complete Works

by Virginia Woolf

Their marriage was over, he thought, with agony, with relief. The rope was cut; he mounted; he was free, as it was decreed that he, Septimus, the lord of men, should be free; alone (since his wife had thrown away her wedding ring; since she had left him),

“To whom?” he asked aloud, “To the Prime Minister,” the voices which rustled above his head replied. The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first, that trees are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever.

The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create.

Real madness

It was Sally Seton—the last person in the world one would have expected to marry a rich man and live in a large house near Manchester, the wild, the daring, the romantic Sally!

“He’s read nothing, thought nothing, felt nothing,” he could hear her saying in that very emphatic voice which carried so much farther than she knew.

And so there they lived, with their linen cupboards and their old masters and their pillow-cases fringed with real lace, at the rate of five or ten thousand a year presumably, while he, who was two years older than Hugh, cadged for a job. At fifty-three he had to come and ask them to put him into some secretary’s office, to find him some usher’s job teaching little boys Latin, at the beck and call of some mandarin in an office, something that brought in five hundred a year;

She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her. But it was Clarissa one remembered. Not that she was striking; not beautiful at all; there was nothing picturesque about her; she never said anything specially clever; there she was, however; there she was.

she kept coming back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage; which was not being in love, of course; it was thinking of her, criticising her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain her.

she hated frumps, fogies, failures, like himself presumably; thought people had no right to slouch about with their hands in their pockets; must do something, be something;

Infinite numbers of dull people conglomerated round her, of course. But odd unexpected people turned up; an artist sometimes; sometimes a writer; queer fish in that atmosphere. And behind it all was that network of visiting, leaving cards, being kind to people; running about with bunches of flowers, little presents; So-and-so was going to France—must have an air-cushion; a real drain on her strength; all that interminable traffic that women of her sort keep up; but she did it genuinely, from a natural instinct.

If you walked with her in Hyde Park, now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.

She had a sense of comedy that was really exquisite, but she needed people, always people, to bring it out, with the inevitable result that she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination.

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in his hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning; which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. It was impossible that he should ever suffer again

Every one if they were honest would say the same; one doesn’t want people after fifty; one doesn’t want to go on telling women they are pretty; that’s what most men of fifty would say, Peter Walsh thought, if they were honest.

They were going to Sir William Bradshaw; she thought his name sounded nice; he would cure Septimus at once.

found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.

when Evans was killed, just before the Armistice, in Italy, Septimus, far from showing any emotion or recognising that here was the end of a friendship, congratulated himself upon feeling very little and very reasonably.

Parallel w C not feeling wrt sister death. C protected by family

Lucrezia, the younger daughter, he became engaged one evening when the panic was on him—that he could not feel.

He could not feel.

but something failed him;

C= Richard failed him

The bed was falling; he was falling.

C bed gets narrower. Septimus and C are doubles

But beauty was behind a pane of glass.

How Shakespeare loathed humanity—the putting on of clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and the belly! This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair. Dante the same. Aeschylus (translated) the same.

Love between man and woman was repulsive to Shakespeare. The business of copulation was filth to him before the end.

For the truth is (let her ignore it) that human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment. They hunt in packs. Their packs scour the desert and vanish screaming into the wilderness. They desert the fallen. They are plastered over with grimaces.

So there was no excuse; nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel.

Patient is set of symptoms

health is largely a matter in our own control.

he could always switch off from his patients on to old furniture?

not merely of lightning skill and almost infallible accuracy in diagnosis, but of sympathy; tact; understanding of the human soul.

Bradshaw celebrated for sympathy that he doesn’t have

questions,

No conversation only questionnaire

Some were irreparable).

Arrogance of expertise

He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom to be noted on the card.

He had committed an appalling crime and been condemned to death by human nature.

Human nature is inherently brutal

perfectly looked after.

Government wd pay

the people we care for most are not good for us when we are ill.

Mutual care to be avoided

He had threatened to kill himself. There was no alternative. It was a question of law.

not of Sir William.

The fellow made a distasteful impression.

“where we will teach you to rest.”

That was his own affair, said Septimus.

Preserving his integrity

“Try to think as little about yourself as possible,” said Sir William kindly.

“Trust everything to me,”

Sir William Bradshaw was not a nice man.

But what more did she want?

proportion,

Moderation is bad as have to give up feelings. Instead have to come back from extremes.

England prosper,

Get loonies out of the way

forbade childbirth, penalised despair,

Conversion

Forcing to her own beliefs