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| Virginia Woolf
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. At 46 one must be a misre; only have time for essentials. Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title. Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works. Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible. For most of history, Anonymous was a woman. For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year? Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue. I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the streetI was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly. Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself... And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Most of a modest woman's life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious. Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them. Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent. One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph. One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. So the days pass, and I ask myself whether one is not hypnotized, as a child by a silver globe, by life, and whether this is living. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied? The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general. The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping. There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father. Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail. We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print. Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body? Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort. |
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