Pages from the diary of Lady Ottoline Morrell (feat. Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot), from Garsington May 27 (1926)

OMG, I finally finished this art. I've had this sketch in my folder for three months. All I have left is the Sapnap. Also In the posts below, you can find Dream :)

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

Virginia Woolf

She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together.

Virginia Woolf, from Moments of Being, Autobiographical Writings

The ghostly reflections of tree branches mirrored in puddles.

(Or: when thawing snow turns the world into a looking glass.)

It took me extra long to walk to the Black Power Studies seminar today. Perambulating down Oxford Street, I was distracted by every image I saw reflected in the puddles—the sun behind the clouds, the buildings, the power lines, the birds, the gloomy sky. While I was staring at a puddle I was shaken by the sudden THUD of a pedestrian getting hit by a gold minivan. The pedestrian seemed okay, but that unsettling feeling that life can end at any moment stayed with me throughout the day.

Strangely, Virginia Woolf had a lot to say about puddles and mortality. Some quotes:

Some cleavage of the dark there must have been, some channel in the depths of obscurity through which light enough issued […].  The mystic, the visionary, walking the beach on a fine night, stirring a puddle, looking at a stone, asking themselves “What am I,” “What is this?” […]. 

—To the Lighthouse (1927)

“There is the puddle,” said Rhoda, “and I cannot cross it.  I hear the rush of the great grindstone within an inch of my head.  Its wind roars in my face.  All palpable forms of life have failed me.  Unless I can stretch and touch something hard, I shall be blown down the eternal corridors for ever.”

— The Waves (1931)

There was the moment of the puddle in the path; when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended; I could not step across the puddle; I tried to touch something . . . the whole world became unreal.

— “A Sketch of the Past” (1939)

.

.

The sudden dissolution of the world, of the self. That’s the horror of the puddle that cannot be crossed, the puddle that augurs madness.

I swear I remember reading about the puddle-grindstone passage in Woolf’s diary, which was absorbed into her novel The Waves. In my vague memory it was connected to news from (Ethel Smyth?) about someone’s suicide. Someone named Carrie, or Caroline, I swear there was an incident that sent Woolf spiraling. An adult incident, a repetition of the dissociative puddle incident from her childhood. But now I cannot find it. Or maybe it was connected to news from Vita, I don’t know. Or maybe the news of the mutual friend’s suicide and the fear of crossing the puddle were falsely fused in my mind by the intensity of my fixations. I had filed the detail away in a dusty drawer of my brain because of the suicided Carrie I knew, the one mirrored everywhere in Woolf’s work. Water suicides. I keep thinking they reveal: there is no ontology. Only God has being, as the Sufi metaphysicians say (and strikingly, the Ocean is the proverbial metaphor for union with God in Sufi poetry, for the only way to stop a drop from drying up is to throw it in the ocean).

Picture of Monet's garden at Giverny // Audrey Hepburn // The Great War by Taylor Swift // Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older by Sydney Eddison // Flower Garden by Emil Nolde // Alfred Lord Tennyson // A Pathway in Monet's Garden by Claude Monet // Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf // Resting in the Garden by Pierre Bonnard // Taylor Swift posing for her album folklore

literature class and insane women

I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way.

Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (1926)

from the diaries of Virginia Woolf

takes her lemon-coloured sponge and soaks it in water ; it turns chocolate-brown

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

Virginia Woolf

Come una ragnatela

[...] fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

V. Woolf, A room of one's own, 1929. Su Gutenberg.

Immagine: sul mio terrazzo.