Regrettably, I must say that I’ve failed to read enough of this book to be able to write any good article on it. So instead of that, I resign myself to writing a very short story about that particular reading experience.
As a humble homage to the genius of Virginia Woolf, I present here a recreation of my own stream of thought as I was reading her novel To the Lighthouse yesterday evening. The events are not fictitious but the language has certainly been catered for this purpose. Needless to say, however, it is beyond my feeble ability to reflect the inimitable style of Virginia’s brilliant writing.
Please do visit the other blogs that joined the Woolf in Winter group read in order to get a finer understanding of this mesmerizing novel and the masterful artist who created it.
January 29, 2010 - 5:42 PM
“It may still be fine tomorrow,” he whispered to himself. “I just have to be up very early and it’ll still be Friday on the other side of the world.”
But it won’t be fine, for already it’s starting to get late, his watch had told him, and he was sitting and reading still, far from finishing, far from exclaiming silently yet proudly “I have finished it! I have finally finished it!” And it was his fault; his fault that he had only picked up his reader when the time’s already short, his days regrettably more occupied, and more odious matters at work had already sprung up to steal all but very little of his attention. Yes, he shouldn’t have put off reading it, he thought; it was not that short to be put off—it was not the sort to be put off. The book has more than three dozen chapters, and he had less than a dozen hours to spare earlier in the week. No, it won’t be fine tomorrow, he thought, and he reproached himself for his foolishness; certainly, he should not have put it off.
That reader, that tiny little instrument with a screen so sensitive to his touch, fabricated by a company in Cupertino which chose a bitten fruit as its royal emblem—it had not been delightful, he thought, reading from that reader. But was it not he who should be called the reader? He mused about that and smiled at the ironies with which man labels his creations. But quickly, he removed the smirk from his face when a view from the edges of his vision reminded him that a pretty young girl was sitting close to him, her long white legs still stretched straight from under the round coffee table that gave no more cover than what her tiny little shorts could provide. He had already smiled at her, after all, just a few minutes ago when she had dropped her red pen (just next to her perfectly smooth, outstretched legs) and, voluntarily, he picked it up (for he considered himself to be a gentleman), and she accepted it with her thanks and with her fingers whose nails had been polished also with the color red. But somehow, it looked as if she was frowning now, staring intently at a big notebook that occupied half her table (or was it a big portfolio of papers?—he wasn’t sure, for he was shy to look and invite another glance from this girl who seemed ready to make conversations with him but didn’t quite seem to be of legal age yet). Was it possible that the source of her frown is also the source of his frustration? Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, he was about to imagine, but he put away the thought and returned his focus to his reader.
He had planned to write a lot of notes, he remembered; more notes than he’s ever written for one book; more than he’s even written for one author; more than he’ll need to write a dissertation; more than what the girl—but he stopped and did not finish the thought. He had planned to be seriously taking notes, and be proud of himself for all he’s written and all he’s learned. But now there’s not even a single page about Woolf in his black notebook. What little notes he has had been scribbled not with ink (nor with lead) but with electronic pulses, and stored in such a volatile state of existence, encoded inside the same little instrument with which he was currently reading and re-reading.
So what he had was a lot of questions, a lot more than he had been able to write down. “Who is talking now?” he repeatedly asked himself. “Whose perspective is this now?” If his dear friend Claire had not informed him that the scenes were recurring across different perspectives, it probably would have taken him half the book before he figured that out. “And who blundered what?” he also asked. Who was Mildred? Was she a servant, a cook? Who was Carmichael and why was he there at the Ramsey’s, inviting scorn upon himself by asking for another plate of soup? And what of Mr. Tansley—the “little atheist,” the odious little man who kept asserting himself, antagonizing (though without his knowing perhaps) James’ hope of going to the lighthouse—that unpolished specimen; why was he a most uncharming human being? Did he really believe that a woman cannot be a learned creature—a talented creature—a reader, a painter or a poet? Had men in those times really thought in such manner? Certainly those who’ve met Virginia would have believed otherwise. And what about Shakespeare, what did Woolf think of him? Did her references to his name suggest that he admired that man admired by many? Or was it mockery, a kind of assertion that he was really not a bit more talented than a learned woman? A learned woman—Virginia herself was more than that, obviously; far more than that.
He was not used to it, reading scene after scene but not getting the full picture; not understanding every sentence despite of them not carrying any implications of mystery. The revelation about Mrs. Ramsey’s death was quite blunt, at least, if not sadly surprising; as with Andrew; as with Prue. Oh Prue! Why must a woman of perfect beauty pass away like that? Somehow he managed to imagine that Prue would have fared better in his arms, if only he had lived in that same time, and shared with them the same dinner, the same extended monologues of sympathy and denigration, as well as the same dialogues of whether or not it was possible to go to the lighthouse. He would have loved to meet Prue. And he loved Virginia’s writing beginning from page one—he the loved the natural, undisrupted flow of thoughts (“stream of consciousness,” they call it) and the flood of commas and semi-colons and exclamations and other punctuations that all seemed to occur more frequently than the period. He loved Virginia’s eloquent manner; it was a new experience to him and he loved it. But he had been way over his head, he still mused, signing up for a reading which proved to be more than his mind had been trained to handle. He was not yet prepared for Woolf, and it didn’t help at all that he was not yet familiar to the classics. And neither did it help that he didn’t even knew what a starling was (a bird as it turned out).
He remembered something he read about Faulkner: if you still don’t get it on the third reading, read it for a fourth time. Faulkner, he thought; he still hasn’t read any of the three books by Faulkner that’s been left untouched in his shelf for a few months now. As for Woolf, he’s certain he’s already gone through the first eight chapters at least eight times, and yet here he was, still clueless as if he had not yet read at all. Actually, he thought, for some pages it must be better if he had not read them at all. There was no time, and soon his efforts would be in vain. If only he was at home then he would’ve went straight to his shelf and picked up Faulkner instead. Or perhaps Hemingway, he mused (for he loved Hemingway); or Fitzgerald or Kafka or Proust or, come to think of it, why not Austen? He had an Austen, bought just recently; just last Tuesday, in fact. And it’s a new edition—a beautifully bound edition with a cartoonishly gothic cover and deckle-edged pages infused with a clean, earthy fragrance he loved so much to inhale.
But he was not at home and was rather far from it. And it didn’t help that he was at the mall, near a little store with books in fine binding. Before heading to that cozy coffee shop (and it occurred to him that he was always in a coffee shop) which he was not a regular patron of, but in whose narrow alcove he had been sitting for an hour now, he went first to that little bookstore and looked for a copy of Gargoyle—for as he entered the mall he immediately remembered that it had a little store with books in fine binding, and one of those books (as he’d seen more than a month ago) was a gorgeous trade paperback edition of Andrew Davidson’s Gargoyle, a book which he had thought of buying a year before when it was still in hardcover, but soon decided not to, but was again recommended to him (this time by someone whose taste in books he’s certainly come to trust), and so was now again in his buying list—and indeed there it was, a single copy, tucked between an array of other literature that didn’t interest him except for an even more beautiful copy of The Cellist of Sarajevo, which he also picked up because it also came highly recommended by another friend, and because the cover and the paper and the typeset and the scent were indeed lovelier than those of the hardbound books standing in his shelf at home. Now he wanted to read The Cellist, and for a moment he did pick it up, but after flipping the fine-textured pages he felt a pang of regret that he still has not finished Woolf’s novel.
“Where is she?” he asked as he glanced at his watch, suddenly remembering that he was there waiting for his cousin Kathleen, who was also a reader, someone who had been in love with books far earlier that he had. She would laugh at him when she sees him reading on the small device, but it was not as if he had a choice. Not even the little store with books in fine binding had anything by Woolf. No store in Manila, it seemed, had a book by Woolf. “What’s taking her so long?” he asked again. And then he imagined a dear old friend of his suddenly appearing at the other end of the store, walking towards him into the narrow alcove, wearing her most endearing smile—it had never failed to leave him breathless, that smile. And after the smile (he continued to imagine) she would call out his name just like it had always been. “David!” she would call, with her bright and pleasant voice that made his name sound like a sweet melody; “David!” as if it had already been a lifetime. She had Chinese eyes, like Lily Briscoe’s perhaps, though her face was certainly not “puckered” (whatever Woolf meant by that, he thought), not puckered at all. It was beautiful; she was beautiful—an astonishing beauty, like Lily’s image of Mrs. Ramsey. It almost made him fall in love again, just imagining that face.
But he would not see her that way, he knew; not that day, not anymore. She had her own family now, a family he certainly was not part of. And that was that, he told himself, that was that. And for him it would indeed be a lifetime.
*
At home he was still reading, and it was getting late, the clock above his left had told him. It was close to midnight and he was still reading. His eyes felt more closed than open, and he could barely feel the little reading device in his hand. It must already be a dream.
No, he thought, it would not be fine tomorrow.
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