Virginia Woolf's To the Light House
Anyone reading Virginia Woolf for a story will find themselves sorely confused. Virginia Woolf does not write stories. She writes about people. She spills life in lines, spurring characters into action and musings, supplementing them with acute details, letting them exist with a stubbornness that only real things possess. While her character's outer shapes are cast like silhouettes into memory, their thoughts and musings flow from the page into one's mind so smoothly and so easily, it is as if they were one's own.
No one fits life, with all its richness and wondrous ordinariness, into books like Virginia Woolf.
In To the Lighthouse, Woolf fits a handful of lives, not just into a book, but into a day. We meet the cast of the novel on a summer's day on the Isle of Skye where we spend half the novel with them, observing their thoughts, watching the children play, listening in at dinner. We get to know them only to have them disappear.
The books first section, titled "The Window" provides a window-view, allowing us a glimpse into the character's lives. Woolf knew how to write thoughts, but she also knew how to write time, and here she draws it out like a beam, gloriously, wondrously. That single day feels like
the type of day one longs for as soon as it is over. It is full of good
company, walks along the beach and other simple time-passes, and,
importantly, revelations realized from the wondrously ordinary. It is indeed not a story, for there is little permanence in it and little happens that we have not experienced ourselves, in one way or another.
From the beginning, one quickly loses the illusion that this is a story, in which one event follows another. Rather, the book feels from the outset like a memory, and if it is a memory, it is a fond one.
Like
most fond memories, this one takes place away from home and the
everyday-ness of life, during the summer, surrounded by good company.
Throughout, it is as if the people inside the story know they are characters inside a book, for every
moment of their literary lives is heightened, full of deep discovery. Through the text-lined window
from which we see them, the characters exist at the pinnacle of their being, and
every moment, once ended, is immediately stowed into the space in which
one keeps their fondest memories. Every moment within the first half of To the Lighthouse
reminds one of the good old days, which ever those may be; and though
they are not ours, we remember our own golden days; days in which, looking
back, we feel we were our best selves, were with our favorite people; the days in which we so gloriously happy that we realize too late that
we forgot to revel in it.
Throughout the book, it feels as if the characters are aware that they will never
exist outside the limit of these 200 pages. Thus, the moments they do
have contain all the life inside of them, reminding one of the days in which they felt most alive. Every thought within reads like a
sigh, as if the characters whose minds we momentarily share are taking pleasure in this simple instance of their
existence.
This gives them both a permanence and a vulnerability because I, the reader, know that they will be here again. In their time-span this will be the last trip to the Isle of Skye as a completed family. In my life though, I know they will be here again, for if in a few years I reread Woolf's To the Light House I will find them there still, feeling a bit like a memory or a dream. I will find them going for walks, painting on the shore, reading to their children, alive and returned to those sweet days which they long for in the latter half of the book.
While at times that single day seems to last forever, one still gets a sense that it is slipping through one's fingers. Moments heightened by thought last a while only to drift away in an instant. So, dinner ends and Mrs. Ramsay knows that it is already a memory. Sometimes it is not clear whether something has already happened. Is Mrs. Ramsay thinking about something that happened this morning? Or is it something that has been done so many times that it is a part of the very fabric of her life? Still, this single day wanders back and forth like the tide, and mundane tasks are thought about as if they are already memories.
Indeed, I had not yet ended that near perfect day for the first time when I wrote in the margins of the book that the characters only existed here, in this stretch of a day across half a novel. There is no day that comes after this one, for when it is over ten years pass in an instant, as with a breath extinguishing a candle. I knew before I'd even watched time unleash itself in the "Time Passes" section that if the family did not decide today to go to the lighthouse tomorrow, they would not go at all. If the missing brooch was not found on the beach that evening, it probably never would be. If Mrs. Ramsay did not finishing knitting her son's stocking by the time the day was through, she never would.
All one ever has is a day before time unfolds like pages full of unwritten story, and a perfect summers day becomes the good old days of a lost past.
To the Light House is itself a window, like a house one often passes late in the evening, the people inside are always there, in the soft light behind the glass, inviting the illusion that they never change. I know I will pass this house with its glowing window again, and I know that even as I circle the garden, time will pass above me like a lapse replayed.
Still, when the longing for the good days nestles inside me like an ache, I will read about the Isle of Skye and the family that used to come there every summer, knowing full well that even books are limited in their capacity to hold things, and so, I will not get to go to the lighthouse, no matter how many times I try. I only get to look upon Mr. Ramsay and his children come upon it from a distance.
