To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

It seemed to her such nonsense—inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough.

How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all?

Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.

she wanted only to be like other people, insignificant.

Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to

rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty...

she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.

For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to help, to give, that people might say of her, "O Mrs Ramsay! dear Mrs Ramsay… Mrs Ramsay, of course!" and need her and send for her and admire her?

she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best.

He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on,

as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were?

Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again.

But he kept looking back over his shoulder as Mildred carried him out, and she was certain that he was thinking, we are not going to the Lighthouse tomorrow; and she thought, he will remember that all his life.

And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish.

Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's.

We might all sit down and cry, she felt. But she did not know what for.

And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.

friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

She had done the usual trick—been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her.

Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions—"Will you fade? Will you perish?"—scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain.

It was not easy or snug this world she had known for close on seventy years. Bowed down she was with weariness. How long, she asked, creaking and groaning on her knees under the bed, dusting the boards, how long shall it endure?

What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature?

Mrs Ramsay dead; Andrew killed; Prue dead too—repeat it as she might, it roused no feeling in her. And we all get together in a house like this on a morning like this, she said, looking out of the window. It was a beautiful still day.

They stood there, isolated from the rest of the world. His immense self-pity, his demand for sympathy poured and spread itself in pools at ther feet, and all she did, miserable sinner that she was, was to draw her skirts a little closer round her ankles, lest she should get wet.

Always (it was in her nature, or in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy

pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of doubt.

But what a power was in the human soul!

What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have—to want and want—how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!

how "you" and "I" and "she" pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint.

So that was the Lighthouse, was it? No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one thing. The other Lighthouse was true too.

she did not want to tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and escape that she wanted,