A Match In the Dark

To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

I finished To The Lighthouse this evening, went for a run, came home and wrote almost all of this review while soaking in the bath. I had to run to expend some energy between the reading and the writing. I had to bathe because I have a tight Achilles, and I want to be able to walk when I wake up tomorrow. I had to write on my phone because I couldn’t delay. You understand how it goes.

Reading this book was a somewhat agonizing experience for me, and it took me much longer than expected. MUCH longer! It’s only 209 pages long. But each page!!!! Each page is full of such words and they’re strung together into such sentences and it’s just…so much life. I was caught somewhere between frustration with how slow my progress was, the feeling that I should be reading 100 pages in a sitting, and a wish that it would take forever—the sense that I should only read a page a day or less than that.

When I read An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, I was captivated by Clarice Lispector’s opening note, which reads, “This book demanded a greater liberty that I was afraid to give. It is far above me. Humbly I tried to write it. I am stronger than I.” When I turned the last page of To The Lighthouse this quote is what popped into my head. This novel is lightness and blades of grass and dinner table candle flames, soft fabric and wisps of hair waving in the breeze, discreetly but precariously covering up the firm and loud, beautiful and monstrous beating heart at the center of what it means to be alive. I’m not sure that Woolf would have been afraid to give the liberty required for this novel, but I imagine that for her it was in many ways agonizing to write—not least because it was her most autobiographical novel. So it’s good that I was agonized. I extend my gratitude.

To sum it up in the simplest terms possible (ha ha), this is a novel about subjective perception. In the first section we are introduced to our characters and our setting—a family, the Ramsays, at their coastal home in Scotland. There’s Mr. Ramsay, the scholar thinker writer. There’s the little milieu that orbits him—young men who want to be thinkers or poets, older men who are scientists, artists and pretty young ladies who like to flirt with him. There’s Mrs. Ramsay, beautiful and magnetic, powerful and domestic. In many ways, she is the true sun around which the planets of the novel orbit. And then there are her eight children. Well, hers and Mr. Ramsay’s. But the children are hers.

From the start and for the entire first part of the novel, we never move outside of one character or another’s subjective thoughts. Not once! It begins with James, the youngest child wishing he had a axe to gash his father in the chest after being callously told that bad weather would prohibit a lighthouse visit the following day.  From there Woolf throws us around quite a bit, from eye to eye and mind to mind. Initially I was struck by how well she captures the way that her characters live in their own heads—how we all do. There are these massive gaps, that we must bridge, between what we see and think and what other people see and think. She shows how easy it is to believe that the missing pieces will never be filled in, that we will always be a little bit in the dark when it comes to any other living soul, and we must somehow learn to live with that disconnection.

This is, of course, what art is, and it is why we use words and why the poets write and the artists paint and the singers sing and all the rest, but I don’t have time for that right now!

It wasn’t long before I noticed something. Woolf’s perspective jumps are most satisfying in moments when it actually becomes clear that, while two characters may be having unique subjective experiences, they are actually more in sync than you could imagine. I fell in love with these flashes—recurring and beautifully, believably rendered—when one character determines that she knows exactly what another is thinking, or even better, that another knows exactly what she is thinking, and she turns out to be exactly right. She is reading a mind or having hers read! She is alive at the same moment as the other, experiencing the same thing, thinking the same thought. It is possible.

Which brings me around to possibly the most captivating chapter of any novel I’ve ever read (absolutely do not quote me on that)—the dinner party scene. I was blown away for all thirty pages of it (twenty-eight and a half). I didn’t even read it in one sitting, though I would like to and probably will before this book goes back on my shelf. The scene is simple. Everyone in the house gathers for dinner. Mrs. Ramsay has arranged Boeuf en Daube since William Bankes, who usually dines in his own room, has agreed to dine with the rest of the party at last. A group of the younger children and guests have been off to the beach and are late getting back, but they make it just in time.

Though it’s just another dinner with house guests only—not a spectacularly special occasion—the energy crackles. Woolf is at her best. Both the isolation of interiority and the near magic of human understanding are highlighted. There’s Mrs. Ramsay, completely caught off guard when some old acquaintances are mentioned—she had forgotten about them and how funny that they just kept “going on living all these years when she had not thought of them more than once all that time.” Then we flash to William Bankes who is wishing that he had dined in his room—he wants to work and does not enjoy family life—he fears that Mrs. Ramsay will sense his treachery of thought. From there, we get Mr. Tansley thinking about how he will “sarcastically describe ‘staying with the Ramsays’” later amongst his friends—feeling frustrated that no one is asking him for his opinion in the current conversation on the fishing industry.

But then we get Lily Briscoe who snaps us back into the realization that these people are not all stuck completely in their heads, in their own subjective experiences. They are there together, sharing something, whether they want to or not. Considering Mr. Tansley, “Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man’s desire to impress himself, lying dark in the midst of his flesh—that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation?” She knows exactly what he is thinking and feeling, and she is right! By what mechanism is this possible!?

Hard to say, but it is possible—it happens all the time, constantly. Certainly you’ve experienced it, and certainly you’ve also learned that among us all, some are more attuned to this channel of unspoken understanding, more adept at mind reading. These are the Mrs. Ramsays of the world. More than any other character, she traverses the space between the self and the other. At dinner alone, she requests magnanimity from Lily Briscoe with her eyes alone and is understood. She has a full conversation about second servings of soup with Mr. Ramsay from opposite ends of the table, and each knew “exactly what the other felt.” She admires the beautifully arranged bowl of fruit serving as a centerpiece at the same moment as Augustus Carmichael, and though his way of looking is different from hers, they are united.

Something about the setting around the dinner table, the domesticity of it, her power within the domain, allows her to pull back the veil.

“It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.”

This is not the only instance in the novel when Mrs. Ramsay—or some other character—achieves this level of clarity. True to life, Woolf is always insistent that these moments are alternately energizing and exhausting. Sometimes the work of crossing the boundary comes naturally, and sometimes it takes work. Reading To The Lighthouse echoed these conditions—I was alternately soaring and trudging—and I imagine that the writing of it followed the same course as well. Perhaps this is obvious, but if the experience of the writing and of the reading constitute living examples of the central message of the novel, the thing is well done and the message is true.

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As a little bonus, mainly because I cannot not include this, I leave you with my favorite quote from the novel. Among many underlined, bracketed and boxed in passages, this one is the one.

“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were daily little miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make the moment something permanent)—this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said.”

Until next time—strike a match unexpectedly in the dark. xx

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Thank you to my sister, Kathryn, for giving me this book. Kathryn—If you haven’t read this you should. You can borrow my copy if you promise not to dogear the pages like a lunatic.

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