The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’

Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then—our friends are not able to finish their stories.’

I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.

Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining.

How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.

I am conscious of flux, of disorder; of annihilation and despair. If this is all, this is worthless.

Words crowd and cluster and push forth one on top of another. It does not matter which. They jostle and mount on each other’s shoulders. The single and the solitary mate, tumble and become many. It does not matter what I say.

(How much, let me note, depends upon trousers; the intelligent head is entirely handicapped by shabby trousers.)

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

I shall never succeed, even in talk, in making a perfect phrase. But I shall have contributed more to the passing moment than any of you; I shall go into more rooms, more different rooms, than any of you. But because there is something that comes from outside and not from within I shall be forgotten; when my voice is silent you will not remember me, save as the echo of a voice that once wreathed the fruit into phrases.’

One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.

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

I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.

I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?

Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths.

But which is the true story? That I do not know. Hence I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them. Thus waiting, thus speculating, making this note and then another, I do not cling to life.

Must, must, must. Must go, must sleep, must wake, must get up—sober, merciful word which we pretend to revile, which we press tight to our hearts, without which we should be undone.

‘The crystal, the globe of life as one calls it, far from being hard and cold to the touch, has walls of thinnest air. If I press them all will burst. Whatever sentence I extract whole and entire from this cauldron is only a string of six little fish that let themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers.

‘Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth.

But if there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning? Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to sell it.