2023-09-05 08:40:45
Virginia Woolf
Picture of sydney Rae in Unsplash
I think it was mid-January of this year when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. To indicate a date I must first remember what I saw. So now I think of the fire, of the yellow light fixed on the page of my book, of the three chrysanthemums in the round vase on the fireplace. Yes, it was probably winter, and we would have just finished our tea, because I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked through the cigarette smoke and my eyes stopped for a moment on the burning coal; That old image of the red flag flying from the castle tower came to my mind, and I thought of the red knights ascending the side of the black rock. To my relief, seeing the mark on the wall interrupted the thought, for it is an old image, an automatic image, perhaps built as a child. The mark was small and round, black on the white wall, regarding six inches above the fireplace.
How easily thoughts are thrown on a new object; they lift it up for a few moments—like ants carrying a blade of straw so greedily—and then they drop it… If a nail had left that mark, it mightn’t have been from a painting; it should have been for a miniature, the miniature of a lady with white curls, powdered cheeks, and lips like carnations. A forgery of course, since those who lived in this house before us would have chosen that type of painting: an old painting for an old room. Those kind of people were: very interesting people. And I think of them so often, in such strange places, because I’ll never see them once more, never know what happened next. They left this house because they wanted to change the style of the furniture, so he said; and he was regarding to say that, in his opinion, behind all art there must be ideas when we were separated, as we are separated from the lady who is regarding to serve tea, or the young man who is regarding to hit the tennis ball in the backyard of a house on the outskirts when passing fast on the train.
But as for the brand, I’m not sure; I don’t think it was caused by a nail following all. It’s too big, too round. I should get up, but if I do and look at her, I bet ten to one I mightn’t tell, because when something is done, nobody ever knows how it happened. Oh poor me! How mysterious is life! How inaccurate is the thought! How ignorant is humanity! To show how little control we have over our possessions, how haphazard life is even following all these years of civilization, let me recount some of the things we lose throughout life, starting with what I’ve always thought one of the most mysterious losses… What cat would nibble, what rat would gnaw, three light blue cans with binding tools? And there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skids, the Queen Anne coal buckets, the trifle board, the organ, all lost; and jewelry too. Opals and emeralds lie under the roots of turnips. What a trivial matter indeed! The amazing thing is that she is dressed, that she is sitting here among solid furniture. Because… If you want to compare life with something, you would have to do it with being thrown out of the subway tunnel at eighty kilometers per hour and appearing on the other side without a single pin in your hair! Throw yourself at God’s feet completely naked! Rolling down through the asphodel meadows like a brown parcel dropped from the post office! With hair blowing in the wind, like a racehorse’s tail. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the constant expense and renewal; everything so fleeting, so arbitrary…
And following life. The thick green stems gently pulling down so that the flower bud, opening, invades us with its purple and red light. After all, why mightn’t we be born there as we are born here, helpless, unable to speak or gaze, groping between the roots of the grass, between the fingers of giants? As for saying what trees are, and what men and women are, or whether there are such things, we shall not be in a position to do so in, say, fifty years. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark crossed by thick stems, and rather at the top, perhaps, rose-shaped spots of vague colors, faint pinks and blues that, with time, will become more defined, fade. They will come back, I don’t know what…
And even that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. Something black and round must have left it, something like the leaf of a small rose that has been there since the summer and I, who am not a very attentive housewife… Look at the dust on the fireplace, for example, the dust that, so they say, he buried Troy three times, only fragments of vessels that resisted total annihilation, which seems to be true.
The tree next to the window taps gently once morest the glass… I want to think calmly, calmly, with time, without anything interrupting me, without having to get up from the chair; glide easily from one thing to the other, without difficulty or obstacles. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface and its hard truths. For balance, let me catch the first thought that comes along… Shakespeare… Well, that’ll do as well as any. A man would sit for hours in an armchair, looking at the fire, and a rain of ideas would fall incessantly from the high sky directly into his mind. He held his forehead in his hand, and people were looking through the open door (for this scene must have taken place on a summer night). But how boring is historical fiction! I’m not interested at all. I wish I might find a nice line of thought, a line of which I am indirectly proud, for such are the nice thoughts, very common even in modest and simple people who really think they dislike hearing praise. They are not thoughts that directly praise us—therein lies their beauty; are thoughts like this:
“I went into the room. They discussed botany. I told how I had seen a flower grow on a mound of earth in the grounds of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown during the reign of Carlos I. What flowers were there during the reign of Carlos I?’ I asked (but I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple buds perhaps. And so on. All the time I try to embellish the image of myself in my mind, affectionately, on the sly, without openly worshiping it, for I would catch myself doing it and instantly pick up a book to protect myself. It is curious how instinctively we protect our image from idolatry or any other treatment that would make it ridiculous, or make it so different from the original that it might no longer be believed. Isn’t that funny following all? A matter of great importance. Imagine that the mirror breaks into pieces: the image would disappear; the romantic figure surrounded by deep green forests is no longer there, but only the shell of a person as seen by others, how stifling, shallow, empty, forbidding the world becomes! An uninhabitable world. When we exchange glances in the subways and buses we see the mirror that reflects the void, the glassy in our eyes. And writers in the future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, since, of course, there is not just one but an infinity of reflections. Such are the depths they will explore, the ghosts they will haunt; they will increasingly neglect the description of reality in their stories, assuming that everyone knows it, just as the Greeks did, and Shakespeare perhaps. But these generalizations are useless. The military sound in the world is enough. It reminds us of front-page articles, of state ministers, of a whole series of things that, as a boy, one thought of as themselves; the reference, the real, from which he might not move away at the risk of suffering an unspeakable condemnation. Generalizations, in a way, bring back Sundays in London, Sunday followingnoon walks, Sunday lunches; and also ways of talking regarding the dead, clothing and habits, like the habit of all sitting together in a room until a certain hour even though no one liked it. A rule for everything. The rule of the tablecloths at that time was that they were embroidered, with small yellow divisions, like those of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces that are seen in the photographs. Tablecloths of another type were not true tablecloths. How terrifying, and at the same time, how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday lunches, walks, country houses and tablecloths, were not quite real, that in truth they were almost phantoms, and the condemnation for the one who I didn’t believe in them it was just a feeling of illegitimate freedom. What takes the place of those things now? I wonder. The place of those real things, the reference points. Men maybe, if you are a woman; the masculine point of view that rules our lives, that sets the standard, that sets Whitaker’s Table of Precedence, which since the war has become, I think, a kind of ghost to many women and men and soon, hopefully , they’ll be funny and end up in the trash, where ghosts go, mahogany sideboards and Landseer prints, gods and demons, hell and everything else, leaving us with a heady sense of illegitimate freedom If freedom exists…
Under certain lights the brand appears, in effect, to project from the wall. It is also not completely circular. I mightn’t be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow that suggests that if you trace that crack with your finger, at a certain point a small mound will rise and fall, a smooth mound like those on the South Downs which are said to be cemeteries and camps. . Of the two, I would prefer that they were cemeteries, with that taste for melancholy so characteristic of the English, that it is natural for us to think, at the end of the road, of the bones scattered under the grass… There must be a book on it. Some collector of antiquities has dug up those bones and given them a name… I wonder what kind of man is an antiquities collector? Mostly retired colonels, I would say, retired workers’ party leaders, examining clods of earth and stone, corresponding with neighboring clergy. The letters are opened at breakfast, which makes them seem important; and the comparison of arrowheads requires taking trips across the country, heading to the towns of the county; something that cheers them and their old wives, who want to make plum jam or clean the study, and have every reason to keep the question of camps or graves in perpetual suspense, while the Colonel himself feels pleasantly philosophical accumulating evidence on both sides of the issue. It is true that in the end he is inclined to believe in the camps; and meeting with opposition, he composes a pamphlet which he is regarding to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when he has a stroke and the last thing on his mind is not his wife or son but the camp and the arrowhead, which now it’s in a glass case in the museum next to the foot of a Chinese murderer, a bunch of Elizabethan nails, a few Tudor pottery pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the glass of wine Nelson drank, which is evidence… I don’t know what really.
No, no, no evidence, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and say that the mark on the wall is indeed, what would I say? The head of a giant nail that someone hammered two hundred years ago and that now, due to the patient work of generations As housewives, you’ve revealed your head above the coat of paint and you’re getting your first glimpse of modern life once morest a white wall in a room with the fire going, what would you gain? Knowledge? What are our sages but the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and brewed herbal concoctions in the forest, talking to shrews and writing the language of the stars? And the less we honor them, as superstition diminishes and respect for beauty and mental health increases… Yes, one might imagine a really nice world; calm, spacious, with red and blue flowers in the fields. A world without teachers or specialists or housewives with the profile of policemen; a world that one might cut out with one’s mind, like a fish cutting through the water with its fin, touching the stems of the lilies, suspended above nests of white sea eggs… How good it is here at the bottom, nestled in the center of the universe and looking through the gray waters, with sudden flashes of light and its reflections. If it weren’t for the Whitaker Almanac, if it weren’t for the Table of Precedence!
I must get up and see for myself what the mark on the wall really is, a nail, a rose leaf, a crack?
Here is nature once more, playing her old game of self-preservation, believing that this train of thought threatens to be a mere waste of energy, perhaps even a reality check, for who will ever dare to do so? lift a finger once morest Whitaker’s Table of Precedence? The Archbishop of Canterbury is above the Speaker of the House of Lords, the Speaker of the House of Lords is above the Archbishop of York. Everyone is above someone else, such is Whitaker’s philosophy; and the important thing is to know who is above whom. Whitaker knows and no more talk; so Nature advises you, comforts you, does not scold you; and if nothing comforts you, if you must ruin this quiet hour, he thinks of the mark on the wall.
I understand Nature’s play, how she motivates us into action so that we kill any thought that threatens to upset us or cause us pain. Thus, I suppose, begins our slight contempt for men of action. Men who do not think, we believe. However, it does no harm to put an end to unpleasant thoughts by looking at the mark on the wall.
In fact, now that I’ve just laid eyes on her, I’m sorry I’ve hit a board in the middle of the sea; I feel a gratifying sense of reality, which immediately transports the two Archbishops and the Speaker of the House of Lords into the shadows. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, coming out of a hideous midnight dream, one quickly turns on the light and remains motionless, admiring the chest of drawers, admiring the solidity, admiring reality, admiring the impersonal world that is proof of the existence of things other than ourselves. . That’s what we want to be sure of… Wood is a good thing to think regarding. It is born from a tree, and trees grow, and we don’t know how. They grow for years and years, paying no attention to us; in meadows, in forests, along rivers… All things we like to think regarding. Cows beat their tails once morest their trunks on hot followingnoons; they paint the rivers so green that when a bird dives one expects to see its wings green when it comes out. I like to think of fish swimming upstream like waving flags; and in water beetles slowly traversing mounds of mud on waterbeds. I like to think of the tree itself: first, the near dry feeling of the wood; then think regarding it under the storm; and later in the slow, delicious oozing of the sap. I like to think of him, too, on winter nights, in the empty field, with the leaves almost folded, with nothing openly exposed to the steel bullets of the moon; a bare mast on a land that goes round and round all night long. The birdsong must sound very loud and strange come June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel as they trudge through the cracks in the bark, or lie in the sun on the green leaves and look around with diamond-red eyes… One by one the fibers snap. with the immense and cold pressure of the earth. Then the last storm arrives and the highest branches, when they fall, sink back into the earth. Still and all, life does not end; there are still millions of patient lives waiting for a tree, all over the world, in rooms, on boats, on the sidewalk, in paneled rooms, where men and women sit following tea smoking cigarettes. It is full of pleasant, happy thoughts, this tree. I’d like to think regarding them one by one, but something gets in the way… Where was I? What was all this regarding? A tree? A river? The Downs? The Whitaker Almanac? The asphodel fields? I do not remember anything. Everything moves, falls, slides, disappears… There are too many things. There is someone standing in front of me who says:
I’m going to buy the newspaper.
-Yeah?
“Though what’s the use of buying the newspaper… Nothing ever happens. Damn war!… Anyway, I don’t see why we should have a snail on the wall.”
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.
FIN
Adeline Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941. She was a British novelist, essayist, letter writer, editor, feminist, and short story writer, considered one of the leading figures of twentieth-century literary modernism.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando: A Biography (1928), and her long essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with her famous dictum “A woman must have money and a room of his own if he’s going to write fiction.” She was rediscovered during the 1970s, thanks to this essay, one of the most cited texts of the feminist movement, which exposes the difficulties women face in consecrating themselves to writing in a world dominated by men.
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