Literature Notes

Some quotes:

• "He knew that he knew where the bottle was. Or rather, he knew that he had known where it was ten minutes ago, because why would he forget something like that? And he knew that it was somewhere entirely logical. It was a simple matter of finding the pigeonhole in his head where he had stored the information. But the inside of his head was upside down and shaking vilently and the contents of the other pigeonholes were coming out and getting in the way." [p. 303]
  
  

SUMMARY of the session: I thoroughly enjoyed this romp through modern family life. It is clever, very funny and witty, and yet captures some fundamental truths. Many of the quotes are only memorable in context, but I did capture one near the end that seemed limitless and appealed to my psychology background.

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

Some quotes:

• "Today, again, the sun will rise in the sky and day will break. And no one will remark on this astonishing maggic, no one will great this extraordinary ordinariness with enthusiastic applause." [p. 2]
  
  
• "Nothing is simpler than to step through the doors of the universe. First, you switch on your computer. Then rapture begins, when you teeter on the edge with the world at your fingertips, gaping open like a gigantic box of candies that your two hands and your one lifetime could never hope to exhaust." [p. 5]
  
  
• "We designed them eye-catching Web sites, we offered them a spotlight on the world's greatest stage, we were made for them like fleas for a dog and maple syrup for hypoglycemics, even if not everyone knew it yet." [p. 8]

I guess this also applies to me and this Web site.

• "In a 300-page book, there are always 250 pages too many. Reading books slows you down, it softens you, it wipes you out. When you open a book, a particularly underhanded book, you're neutralized for hours ... " [p. 9]

Selecting a few quotes, as I am doing would suggest that more than 250 pages are too many. On the other hand, a book can also energize you and stimulate you to have thoughts that would not otherwise have happened. One also needs context for the few special sentences - thus the need for the extra pages.

• "Open a truly dangerous book and you cannot easily close it again. " [p. 55]
  
  
• "When train dispatchers do their job, the trains stay on the tracks and the passengers are happy. Real flesh-and-blood train dispatchers no longer exist. They have been replaced by us, the masters of infinitesmal movement, tamers of chips the size of microscopic fleas. " [p. 74]

• "Follow-up is for bureaucrats. Zeno and I never follow up on anything. We never waste a minute on files from the past; we're too busy leaping from peak to summit in search of something new." [p. 79]

This Web site is all follow-up .

• "People. People who need people. So many of them, so many industrious, bright faces, old, young, colored, pale, all pushing towards the banquet table to tear a bite from the magical, inaccessible fruit before none remains, wandering through the termite colony blind to the path to the center, to the delectable heart of the Big Apple, constantly seeking, finding for a brief instant, losing it once more, then setting off in dogged pursuit through the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Battery Park, along Broadway and Canal Street, hopes and fears as countless as human faces." [p. 89]
  
  
• "I went our walking late at night, side by side with endless variations of human beings kept awake by fear and desire. I brushed up against a thousand universes in a single minute, each one different, forever parallel. The gold of New York isn't its skyscapers. It's the people." [p. 108]
  
• "You're never as happy as when you never intended to be." [p. 125]
  
  
• "Presenting the story in schematic form explains nothing, because the plot is no more than a brass plate upon which to serve the main course, and the main course is wild emotion carried along by the words themselves. How can words on paper be transformed into heat and violence? Who knows? It is a deep mystery one step removed from sorcery." [p. 157]
  
  
• " 'First and foremost,' he began, 'is curiosity.' " [p. 173]

  This reminds me of my favorite quotation. The first sentence in Isaac Asimov's "New Guide to Science" is "Almost in the beginning was curiosity."

• "Heard enough, read enough, caught enough hot air from this clandestine crackpot who knew nothing about the sophistication of modern existence. Had he ever switched on a computer or written an E-mail?" [p. 174]
  
  
• "Humanity patches up its differences and smooths its wrinkles in laughter." [p. 176]
  
  
• "Think carefully, Florence. Explore the space rich in possibilities that is opening before you. Reality has its limitations, while whatever you invent has none, and never will." [p. 222]
  
  
• "Writing fiction is a way for him to step far enough back from reality to grasp its totality, the music of all the elements combined. The farther away you are, the clearer everything becomes." [p. 261]
  
  
• "Every word has its uses, every word communicates a stimulus that attracts othe words to it in equal reaction. And as they travel back and forth, a fragile bridge takes shape, spanning the abyss over which we might cross with most infinite of precautions." [p. 264]
  
  
• "It was so rare to be at home, sitting in my favorite armchair, indolent, remote from the complex world of the Web." [p. 266]

SUMMARY of the session: This is a great story of young techies in Montreal. A fascinating read, it is a rare book that is much more than the sum of its words. The book was originally written in French, leaving one to wonder how much better it likely was in its original form.

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

Some quotes:

• "The programs were aimed at elderly viewers with little or no experience of paints and brushes, and the words that cropped up most frequently in Ross's titles for his works - Serenity, Solitude, Golden, Quiet, Retreat, Hideaway, Seclusion, Lonely, Autumn, Winter - were all descriptive of the state of retirement itself." [p. 107]

I can relate to this.

• "In this fictional tempest, the steamer is going by the lead and making the correct signals, while the artist, bound to the mast, is going about his usual business with pencil and sketchpad. This is how the world is. We live with chaos as the encompassing condition of our lives. We learn to work through it. With luck, we emerge from it." [p. 187]

These are the only sentences in the entire novel, other than quotes from historical journals, that are in italics.

• "The Indians were equally impressed by the arts of the visitors - especially by the carved and painted figureheads on their ships, whose meaning and totemic power were much discussed. Interestingly, no one on the Vancouver expedition mentioned seeing a totem pole, nor is one shown in any of the midshipmen's drawings of native villages, though carved house-posts were observed almost everywhere. ... By the 1820's, totem poles were seen everywhere along the Inside Passage: a product of fur-trade wealth and leisure, iron chisels and gouges - and possibly the example of figureheads on white men's ships." [p. 197]

Lovely. Seems like a strong argument to me.

• "The point, surely, is that these compositions [of west coast native art] are infinitely amenable to interpretation, no version of which can be counted final and authoritative. With marvelous stylistic assurance and control, the Indian artists have rendered a world inherently fluid, fragmentary, elusive and chaotic. Look, it's a bear; look again, it's a halibut.This is nature as one meets it in the distorting mirror of the water." [p. 205]

In just a few pages I have learned more about west coast native art than in all of the art books I have seen on this topic.

• "The trouble is that the Indians' oral literature has been systematically eroded by several generations ... starting with the first late-Victorian collectors, who tended to flinch at the stories' bawdy relish for the details of sex and evacuation." [p. 215]
  
  
• "The world of these stories is turbulent and random: again and again, they show the Indians as creatures moving through a landscape full of powers - hapless babes in the malevolent wood." [p. 218]

• "Too often, Indian life on the Northweat coast was pictured as an idyll - the tribes living at one with nature, in a region of unparalleled abundance - until it was violated by the white intruders. Nothing in their own art or literature gave credence to that guilty, sentimental notion." [p. 219]

Now the same comment applies to literature. This novel is packed with insightful commentary, much of it at variance with established scholarship.

• "You were constantly made aware of your own physical insignificance by the girth of the fir, the rearing bulk of the grizzly, the crash of the whale, the massive turmoil of the tide." [p. 220]

  This is one of the main reasons why I like hiking in the mountains in Canada and watching the surf in Australia.

   

SUMMARY of the session: This is a much more powerful book than one realizes!

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

Some quotes:

• "The books kept coming. They reflected a promiscuous addiction, to the sea in general and to the one on my doorstep in particular. I dipped and skimmed, jumping from the physics of turbulence to the cultural anthropology of the Northwest Indians, to voyages and memoirs, to books on marine invertibrates, to the literature of the sea from Homer to Conrad. trying to wrest from each new book some insight into my own compulsion." [p. 22]

  A kindred spirit. Obviously this is one reason why I remember liking this book.

• "The more I looked at these pictures, the more I saw that North-west Indian art was maritime in much more than its subject matter. ... The rage for symmetry, for images paired with their doubles, was gained, surely, from a daily acquaintance with mirror-reflections: the canoe and its inverted twin, on a sheltered inlet in the stillness of dusk and dawn." [p. 24]

  Stunning. I have never seen this (now obvious) connection before.

• [After listing a number of early maritime explorers] "Each had his own voice and, looking at the same stretch of water, saw it in strikingly different terms from the others. To travel with these men, in their tight kneeboots and frogged waistcoats, was to be in on a continuous, sometimes quarrelsome, seminar about the character and significance of the new sea." [p. 26]

  I always like references to the diversity in our ideas and perceptions, without recourse to right or wrong.

• "In an unchronicled society, without writing, things that happened yesterday bleed into ancient history; and after a hundred years of rubbing up against explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonial administrators, the tribe members had ceased to be reliable authorities on their own traditions." [p. 29]

  This is an important insight, and one that should not be forgotten.

• "... also Wayne Suttles, a social anthropologist local to the area, a skeptical empiricist whose essays applied small, bright pins to the gas-filled balloons of received ideas about the Indians and their cosmology." [p. 30]

SUMMARY of the session: A great beginning to a special book.

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• Between the Acts (1941)
  • " '... Next to the kitchen, the library's always the nicest room in the house.' Then she added, stepping across the threshold: 'Books are the mirrors of the soul.' " [p. 934]
  • "For as the train took over three hours to reach this remote village in the very heart of England, no one ventured so long a journey without staving off mind-hunger, without buying a book on a bookstall. Thus the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul bored." [p. 934]

I like the term "mind-hunger". Beautiful. Overall, I did not like this story as much as her previous ones. This one began to give me the impression that she was trying (too hard) to be terribly clever, but the message got lost in the process.

• Here is one final quote from Briggs.

• "Woolf's diary was written primarily for her own rereading, the young Virginia writing to her future self. Sometimes she questioned who she was writing for, recognizing that Leonard [her husband] would be its likeliest reader (and regulating her words accordingly). Sometimes she pondered whether she should report on the wider world, or the doings of her own circle or on her own thoughts and feelings, but increasingly it became a record of what mattered most to her - what she was writing or planning to write, a record of the unfolding creative process itself, ..." [p. 341]

This is similar to thoughts I often have about this web site. I agree - I also write primarly for myself, and what matters most in this context is how one might use technology to further one's own Learning.

SUMMARY of the session: I have completed two books, both well worth the effort of reading carefully. 2:30 PM

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• Three Guineas (1938)
  • I began by reading this normally but after about 10 pages I realized that this was more like an essay on gender than a novel and shifted to skim reading. I actually prefer such a topic to be handled totally in a scholarly fashion than to have a blend of fiction and non-fiction.

This rang true to me as soon as I read it [Briggs]. But I hadn't explicitly recognized it until seeing Briggs comment. This made my reading of the last half of the novel much more lyrical. The sentences had a definite rhythm and the novel began to flow from that moment on.

• Here are some quotes from Briggs.

• "She [Woolf] talked about the creative process, described it as one of apparent inertia, of 'mooning', in which the artist as fisherwoman lets herself 'down into the depths of her consciousness', surrendering herself to the 'mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts and dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive fish the imagination'. But the process is interrupted from time to time as the line slackens, and the diving imagination floats 'limply and dully and lifelessly' to the surface, frustrated because it lacks sufficient experience, or because it is not allowed to say what it wants about women, their bodies and their passions, lest '[m]en ... be shocked." [p. 271]
  
  
• "The themes of her speech to the Society - the enormous differences in attitude and experience betwee herself , her audience and the Victorians, the complex interaction of class and gender, and women's need for freedom to speak more openly of their bodies and their sexuality - became central elements in her thinking over the next decade, and contributed substantially to her final works of fiction." [p. 272]
  
  
• "In Woolf's first novel, these threakening, marginalized figures, who could hardly be thought about, much less talked of, are mysteriously connected with the strict rules as to where young women may walk in London, rules which Rachel finds frustrating and unjust. For Woolf, the constraints on her freedom to walk where she wanted would be linked with the constraints on writing as she wanted ... both sets of limitations were imposed by 'what men thought''. " [p. 277]
  
  
• "Woolf, like so many writers, carries out much of her creative thinking, planning and 'scene-making' as she walked." [p. 278]

This is very much the way I felt as I would walk to the uni in the morning.

• "Woolf's generation had despised the teaching and preaching so characteristic of Victorian literature, suspecting any writing that had manifest designs upon its readers ... Woolf herself had always encouraged her readers to come to their own conclusions." [p. 283]
  
  
• "Vita casually told her that her thoughtlessness made Virginia feel that their friendship was over that she would not be coming to London before she travelled abroad, and her thoughtlessness made Virginia feel that their friendship was over - 'Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls.' " [p. 290]
  
  
• "The result was Three Guineas, a wide-ranging critique of patriarchy and its outcomes in domestic oppression, separate spheres, militarism and imperialism - a book that would take another thirty years or more before it wass fully understood or appreciated." [p. 310]
  
  
• "Today Three Guineas is generally recognized as a founding document in the history of gender studies." [p. 310]
  
  
• "The first chapter of Three Guineas focuses ... on the oppression of women in the home, by family life, and their consequent need to escape." [p. 320]
  
  
• "The second chapter focuses upon women's entry into the professions, and the linked question, still relevant today, of why they are so often underpaid and under-promoted." [p. 321]
  
  
• "But outling the main arguments of Three Guineas gives little idea of the vitality, resonance and play of the text itself." [p. 322]

 

SUMMARY of the session: I am approaching the end of these two books. I have 1 novel, "Between The Acts" to read, and 2 chapters of background and analysis by Briggs. 8:10 PM

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• The Waves (1928)
  • "For most reviewers, it was 'more like a poem than a novel', something very like a poem', a 'prose poem', 'a kind of symphonic poem' and even 'imagist poetry of the first order'. [p. 265]

This rang true to me as soon as I read it [Briggs]. But I hadn't explicitly recognized it until seeing Briggs comment. This made my reading of the last half of the novel much more lyrical. The sentences had a definite rhythm and the novel began to flow from that moment on.

• Here are some quotes from the actual novel.

• "Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing> But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it." [p. 657]
  
  
• " 'I have torn off the whole of May and June,' said Susan, 'and twenty days of July. I have torn them off and screwed them up so that they no longer exist, save as a weight in my side. They have been crippled days, like moths with shrivelled wings unable to fly. There are only eight days left. In eight days' time I shall get out of the train and stand on the platform as six twenty-five. Then my freedom will unfurl, and all these restrictions that wrinkle and shrivel - hours and order and discipline, and being here and there exactly at the right moment - will crack asunder." [p. 662]

This is very close to the feeling I had when I walked out of the university after handing in my notice of retirement.

• "But you understand, you, my self, who always comes at a call (that would be a harrowing experience to call and for no one to come; that would make midnight hollow, and explains the expression of old men in clubs - they have given up calling for a self who does not come ..." [p. 673]
  
  
• "You are all engaged, involved, drawn in, and absolutely energized to the top of your bent - all save Neville, whose mind is far too complex to be roused by any single activity." [p. 673]

This approximates this web site with its many threads....

• "I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am." [p. 676]
  
  
• "I begin to suspect, when I am with you, that I am among the most gifted of men. I am filled with the delight of youth, with potency, with the sense of what is to come." [p. 677]
  
  
• " 'You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages tht seem to approve of your own character." [p. 678]

How did she know???

• "There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over treetops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities." [p. 693]
  
  
• "What is my story? What is Rhodas? What is Nevilles? There are facts, as, for example: 'The handsome young man in the grey suit, whose reserve contrasted so strangely with the loquacity of the others, now brushed the crumbs from his waistccoat and, with a characteristic gesture at once commanding and benign, made a sign to the waiter, who came instantly adn returned a moment later with the bill discreetly folded upon a plate.' That is the truth; that is the fact, but beyond it all is darkness and conjecture." [p. 705]
  
  
• "Also, how I distrust neat designs of life that are drawn upon half-sheets of notepaper. I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement. I begin to seek some design more in accordance with those moments of humiliation and triumph that come now and then undeniably. Lying in a ditch on a stormy day, when it has been raining, then enormous clouds come marching over the sky, tattered clouds, wisps of cloud. What delights me then is the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury. Great coulds always changing, and movement; something sulphurous and sinister, bowled up, helter-skelter; towering, trailing, broken off, lost, and I forgotten, minute, in a ditch. Of story, of design, I do not see a trace then." [p. 751]
  
  
• "But it is a mistake, this extreme precision, this orderly and military progress; a convenience, a lie. There is always below it, even when we arrive punctually at the appointed time with our white waistcoats and polite formalities, a rushing stream of broken dreams, nursery rhymes, street cries, half-finished sentences and sights - elm trees, willow trees, gardners sweeping, women writing - that rise and sink even as we hand a lady down to dinner." [p. 759]
  
  
• " '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 aizzle, making the cauldron bubble like boiling silver, and slip through my fingers." [p. 759]
  
• "So we shared our Pecks, our Shakespeares; compared each other's versions; allowed each other's insight to set our own Peck or Shakespeare in a better light; and then sank into one of those silences which are now and again broken by a few words, as if a fin rose in the wastes of silence; and then the fin, the thought, sinks back into the depths, spreading round it a little ripple of satisfaction, content." [p. 767]

 

• I also played with they actual format of the novel. I found a web site that contained the full text of the novel.
  
  http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91w/
  
  The idea was to change the color of the font for each of the 6 characters in the novel. This was easy as each paragraph in the novel is identified as belonging to the thoughts of one of the 6. The use of colors helped highlight the identity of each person and made it much easier to see when each person had previously 'spoken' and what they thought. Here is a sample:

  ‘I was running,’ said Jinny, ‘after breakfast. I saw leaves moving in a hole in the hedge. I thought “That is a bird on its nest.” I parted them and looked; but there was no bird on a nest. The leaves went on moving. I was frightened. I ran past Susan, past Rhoda, and Neville and Bernard in the tool-house talking. I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? And I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. “Is he dead?” I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you.’

  ‘Through the chink in the hedge,’ said Susan, ‘I saw her kiss him. I raised my head from my flower-pot and looked through a chink in the hedge. I saw her kiss him. I saw them, Jinny and Louis, kissing. Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there.’

  ‘Susan has passed us,’ said Bernard. ‘She has passed the tool- house door with her handkerchief screwed into a ball. She was not crying, but her eyes, which are so beautiful, were narrow as cats’ eyes before they spring. I shall follow her, Neville. I shall go gently behind her, to be at hand, with my curiosity, to comfort her when she bursts out in a rage and thinks, “I am alone.”

  ‘Now she walks across the field with a swing, nonchalantly, to deceive us. Then she comes to the dip; she thinks she is unseen; she begins to run with her fists clenched in front of her. Her nails meet in the ball of her pocket-handkerchief. She is making for the beech woods out of the light. She spreads her arms as she comes to them and takes to the shade like a swimmer. But she is blind after the light and trips and flings herself down on the roots under the trees, where the light seems to pant in and out, in and out. The branches heave up and down. There is agitation and trouble here. There is gloom. The light is fitful. There is anguish here. The roots make a skeleton on the ground, with dead leaves heaped in the angles. Susan has spread her anguish out. Her pocket-handkerchief is laid on the roots of the beech trees and she sobs, sitting crumpled where she has fallen.’

  ‘I saw her kiss him,’ said Susan. ‘I looked between the leaves and saw her. She danced in flecked with diamonds light as dust. And I am squat, Bernard, I am short. I have eyes that look close to the ground and see insects in the grass. The yellow warmth in my side turned to stone when I saw Jinny kiss Louis. I shall eat grass and die in a ditch in the brown water where dead leaves have rotted.’

  ‘I saw you go,’ said Bernard. ‘As you passed the door of the tool- house I heard you cry “I am unhappy.” I put down my knife. I was making boats out of firewood with Neville. And my hair is untidy, because when Mrs Constable told me to brush it there was a fly in a web, and I asked, “Shall I free the fly?

  
  This gives rise to new options for authors as an electronic medium becomes more common. In addition to simple changes like font color, size and type it is also easy to insert images, graphics and photographs. Umberto Eco, well-known for his writing on semiotics, has experimented with this in his recent novel "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana".

It also makes it possible for Learners to play with their form of note-taking, as I have just illustrated.

SUMMARY of the session: Making these notes - retyping out selected passages - is as satisfying as reading it originally. And finding a web site with the text of the novel opened up, for me, a new approach to understanding the novel. Neat. 10:50 am

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• Orlando (1928)
  • I found this a delightful comparison of life as experienced by men and women during the last 400 years. Briggs points out that this entire novel is based on Woolf's relationship with Vita Sackville-West.
  • "Readers of modern texts must be prepared to let their old habits go, and learn to read in a new way." [p. 123]

• A Room of One's Own (1929):
  • "She [Virginia] defends the value of fiction by arguing that 'when a subject is highly controversial ... Fiction ... is likely to contain more truth than fact.' " [p. 223]
  • " 'Lies will flow from my lips', she promises, ' but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping'; here and later she continues to remind her listeners/readers that they must think for themselves." [p. 223
  • "The chapter [in a Room of One's Own] concludes that however 'unpleasant it is to be locked out ... it is worse perhaps to be locked in'. " [p. 226]
    
    

SUMMARY of the session: I have now read Briggs' discussion of Woolf's writing of 9 novels and have another 5 to go. Unfortunately, I have not read any of these latter 5. Three of them are in "Selected Works of Virginia Woolf": The Waves, Three Guineas & Between the Acts. The next task is to read "The Waves".

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• The Common Reader (1925)
  • "Readers of modern texts must be prepared to let their old habits go, and learn to read in a new way." [p. 123]

• Mrs. Dalloway (1925):
  • "For Woolf, fiction's traditional focus on highly charged moments threatened to devalue daily experience. In Mrs. Dalloway, she set out to restore 'the life of Monday or Tuesday' to its proper, central place in fiction. At the same time, avoiding familiar narraive sequences made greater demands on her readers,requiring them to take a more active role in the process of interpretation." [p. 130 -132]]
    
    
  • "Clarissa is humanly inconsistent: at once cold and self-absorbed ... ; yet also warm , quick and full of sympathy." [p. 137]
    
    
• To The Lighthouse (1927):
  • " 'Why am I so incredibly & incurably romantic about Cornwall? One's past, I suppose: I see children running in the garden. A spring day. Life so new. People so enchanting. The sound of the sea at night ... & almost 40 years of life, all built on that: how much so I could never explain.' This was the vision that inspired To the Lighthouse." [p. 162 - 163]
    

  This brings to my mind my similar views about Jasper. One difference would be an increased fondness for nature and the mountains, and going for long hikes alone with only a pack on my back, or fishing from a large log as the light disappeared on Patricia Lake. Why does this leave such an "incredibly & incurably romantic" impression? I will always be grateful that my parents decided to live in Jasper.

  • "Meanwhile, Virginia was deliberately holding herself back: 'I must write a few little stories first, & let the Lighthouse simmer, adding to it between tea and dinner till it is complete for writing out.' " [p. 163]

This is very similar to my approach for working on my model train layout. Let the layout simmer and play with it in small pieces as the ideas themselve emerge. A plan is something one deviates from as better ideas present themselves.

• "She wanted to re-create the constant changes of feeling that pass through human beings as rapidly as clouds or notes of music, changes ironed out in most conventional fiction." [p. 164]
  
  
• " 'I wish you could live in my brain for a week,' Virginia wrote to Vita. 'It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion. What about? I don't know.' " [p. 169]
  
  
• " 'I am back again in the the thick of my novel,' she told Vita, early in February, 'and things are crowding into my head: millions of things ... which I make up walking the streets, gazing into the gas fire. Then I struggle with them, from 10 to 1: then lie on the sofa, and watch the sun behind the chimneys: and think of more things: then set up a page of poetry in the basement, and so up to tea..." [p. 171]
  
  
  

SUMMARY of the session: Once again, selecting some personally meaningful passages, which just seem to jump out of the page, is a very satisfying way to spend an hour.

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

• "Woolf's fiction is centrally concerned with the inner life, and finding ways of re-creating that life in narrative." [p. ix]
  
  
• "Her first short story written for the Hogarth Press takes place inside the head of a woman sitting by a fire and looking at 'The Mark on the Wall' (as the story is called), while she meditates on the elusive and fragmented nature of experience. Her train of thought is interrupted by a man with a newspaper who identifies the mark, thus extinquishing the rich imaginative potential of uncertainty." [p. ix]
  
  
• "In his magisterial survey of representation in European fiction, Mimesis, the German critic Erich Auerbach argued that Woolf's method of depicting the interior life of a range of characters gestured towards 'a common life of mankind on earth', and he considered this a new and significant development in narrative method." [p. x]
  
  
• "In 1918, she noted in her diary, 'The reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one's imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his means to him - the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent'. " [p.x]
  
  
• "She remained a fascinated observer of her own thoughts and also of her own creative process, recording both in her diaries and letters..." [p. x]

This latter point parallels my own interest in Learning, and in how I go about it in a variety of contexts such as model trains, mathematics and this web site.

• The Voyage Out (1915):
  • "But before the novel was finished, the nature and meaning of marriage would be thoroughly explored, and its promise of 'calm sea and fair voyage' dismantled." [p. 3]
    
    
  • "Our narrative expectations are frustrated and disappointed with an abruptness that seems closer to the randomness of life than the tidier outcomes of fiction." [p. 11]
    
• Night and Day (1919):
  • "Instead Night and Day focuses on day dreams, the willed or controlled fantasies in which both the hero and heroine indulge in order to hold the dissatisfactions of their daily lives at bay." [p. 34]
    
    
  • "Woolf's headaches of 1910, 1912 and 1913 may be attributed to genetics or personal trauma, to biohemistry or family interaction, but her inner tensions parallel those of a darkening world beyond." [p. 47]
    
    
  • " 'It's life that matters ... the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself at all.' " [p. 50]

  Once again, this quote of Woolf's mirrors my interest in Learning ... and again ...

  • "... but she recognized that she had failed to solve the riddle of how a modern novel should be written: 'as the current answers don't do, one has to grope for a new one; & the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.' " [p. 51]
    
    
• Monday or Tuesday (1921):
  • Virginia recognized the power of the mind 'plaiting incessantly the many-coloured and innumerable threads of life'..." [p. 75]
    
    
• Jacob's Room (1922)
  • "Woolf's third novel, Jacob's Room, is her protest against the First World War, and the shocking impersonality of its killing machine." [p. 84]
    
    
  • "Woolf had instinctively hated violence from childhood. She remembered the exact moment when she had turned against fighting: she and Thoby had been 'pommeling each other with our fists' on the lawn at St Ives when suddenly she thought, 'why hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and sstood there, and let him beat me,' A sense of 'hopeless sadness ' followed." [p.87-88]
    
    
  • "Jacob Flanders is the unknown warrior, individual and representative, yet minus the distortions of sentiment or retrospective glory. There is nothing military about him, for this was a war fought largely by civilians in uniform." [p. 93]
    
    
  • "The novel seeks to hold together the multiplicity, inconsistency and variety that characterize our experience of living ..."[p. 94]
    
    
  • "Rooms, like our bodies or our lives, express us yet are only partly ours, carrying the marks of our predecessors as well as our own histories." [p. 96]

SUMMARY of the session: Making these notes has been as much fun as reading both Woolf's novel Jacob's Room as well as Briggs' commentary.

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

My first impression of this novel is one of delight. It is such a departure from conventional English literature, with its quick glimpses of inconsequential events. Yet, suprisingly, one ends up with a very deep sense of the person, Jacob Flanders. Why? Perhaps it is because this is actually how we form impressions of everyone. Almost everything about another person is hidden from view, yet we form deep impressions based on the most fragmentary evidence. This is a grand novel.

SUMMARY of the session: I am now looking forward to reading what Julia Briggs has to say about this novel.

 

Literature Notes

link to back cover

I have just completed reading Alice Munro's "The View From Castle Rock".

This is neither a collection of short stories, nor a novel. Rather it is a collage of vignettes, some ficitional, some factual, some a mix, that brings together what she has remembered and collected over the last 60 years regarding her family's history. It is not the work of a family historian nor a genealogist, but the stitching together of events, some hypothetical, by an accomplished author.

I truly enjoyed the book. I like her writing, I would describe it as soft and penetrating. This book carried me quietly along.

SUMMARY of the session: A very satisfying read. I have yet to see a book by Alice Munro that I haven't enjoyed.