Lizzy's review of The Waves (original) (raw)

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Lizzy's Reviews > The Waves

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

The Waves
by

30575403

> The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light.

As I turn the pages of The Waves, Virginia Woolf talks to me, to my heart, my spirit and my soul, like I could not have imagined. Such splendor and beauty come to me through her words, and I feel like singing with her. She sings life, a life that begins and goes on and on. So I keep reading and hope to get lost, to blend with the pages whose sounds are just like the very waves that come and go inexorably.

> The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

If only I could write, if only I were a poet. If only I knew who I was, but I feel the six of them as if they shared my soul. Yes, there are six, and I am only one. But each talks to a part of me. A part that I recognize or a part that I try to hide. As a woman, I am Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda and at the same time, I am not. But I am also Bernard, Neville, and Louis in their daily struggles, despite sometimes feeling so foreign to them. But I am all of them, and they are me. ‘I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.’ We play on along, and we live, we are human in our frailty and our imperfections. We live in our different scenarios, but all in the same planet. And I weep and smile with them for what they fought and are loved for, for their fears and for their insecurities, and their lovers.

The activity is endless. And tomorrow it begins again; tomorrow we make Saturday. Some take train for France; others ship for India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die tonight. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building, policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make life. So you say.

I that had for long forgotten to look inside myself, now crave to know why I lost so many friends or was lost by them. I am jealous of their friendship, as I sometimes feel so solitary and desperate for that human connection that seems some days so far away. I am a chameleon, for I am all six at the same time. Even Percival, for I have died even having survived. ‘How curious one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.’ And I still feel the sorrow of those friends that I do not see anymore, and so seem dead to me. He is all the friends I lost, their long gone memories, and all the friends I gave up. He is the isolation that I built for myself. Was it pride or simply forgetfulness? I grieve and want to yell for help. Is there still time? Could we meet for dinner and perhaps share all our happiness, our misgivings, and our sufferings?

I have had one moment of enormous peace. This perhaps is happiness. Now I am drawn back by pricking sensations; by curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people to whom I could say things: Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet tonight, thank Heaven. Thank Heaven, I need not be alone.

Despite all that I imagine I have in common with all six of them, I feel a special connection with Bernard. Why is that so? Should it not have been with Susan, a female with her family life and her children? I that am also a mother. But no, it is Bernard that talks most to me. Maybe that is because he is the storyteller of the group of friends, what keeps them together. Or perhaps he is one but is at the same time all six of them.

> Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves.

I watch as the waves break close to my feet and I cannot devise how it feels to be confronted with such force and immensity, to hear its deafening bellows as it crashes and almost kills me. ‘The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.’ And I feel I am always eavesdropping on Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda, and I listen to them and journey with them from day to day. I now can say that I met the grave and quiet Neville and understood his love for another part of himself – ‘The leaves now are thick in country lanes, sheep cough in the damp fields; but here in your room we are dry. We talk privately.’ I encountered the ambitious and insecure outsider Louis – ‘I repeat, “I am an average Englishman; I am an average clerk”, yet I look at the little men at the next table to be sure that I do what they do.’ I shared experiences with Susan, her idyllic visions of family and rustic life – ‘At this hour, this still early hour, I am the field, I am the barn, I am the trees; mine are the flocks of birds, and the young hare who leaps, at the last moment when I step almost on him.’ Yes, I have felt for Rhoda’s fear of life, her terror of always being lost and unheard – ‘Identity failed me. We are nothing. I said, and fell.’ I encountered the passionate Jinny and her volatility and her need to feel loved – ‘Now with a little jerk, like a limpet broken from a rock, I am broken off: I fall with him; I am carried off. We yield to this slow flood. We go in and out of this hesitating music.’ And I know Bernard, the eternal storyteller who failed in his first love but unites the friends not only with words – ‘Who am I thinking of? Byron of course. I am, in some ways, like Byron. Perhaps a sip of Byron will help put me in the vein. Let me read a page.’

I am in love with their names and their destinies, I am always with them and outside of it all, but present in spirit.

‘Words and words and words, how they gallop—how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet.’

I read each word, Virginia Woolf’s words, and her lyricism makes me feel very luxurious inside. She uses words that are metaphors for our everyday life, such as waves and storms. Words that are each and every one a treasure to our intellect and our souls. She is a poet and reminds me of Fernando Pessoa and The Book of Disquiet. She has led me through an ephemeral life, or better, six lives, and I feel replete and indulged. And I feel alive despite dying in the end.

And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know.

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Reading Progress

October 2, 2016 – Shelved

October 2, 2016 – Shelved as:to-read

November 29, 2016 –Started Reading

November 30, 2016 –0.0% "The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually."

December 17, 2016 –6.0% "This is our world, lit with crescents and stars of light; and great petals half transparent block the openings like purple windows. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. The stalks of flowers are thick as oak trees. Leaves are high as the domes of vast cathedrals. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver.’"

December 17, 2016 –9.0% "Now that our boxes are unpacked in the dormitories, we sit herded together under maps of the entire world. There are desks with wells for the ink. We shall write our exercises in ink here. But here I am nobody. I have no face. This great company, all dressed in brown serge, has robbed me of my identity. We are all callous, unfriended."

December 17, 2016 –13.0% "'... Therefore I hate looking-glasses which show me my real face. Alone, I often fall down into nothingness. I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge of the world into nothingness. I have to bang my head against some hard door to call myself back to the body.’"

December 17, 2016 –15.0% "I cannot sit down to my book, like Louis, with ferocious tenacity. I must open the little trap-door and let out these linked phrases in which I run together whatever happens, so that instead of incoherence there is perceived a wandering thread, lightly joining one thing to another."

December 17, 2016 –18.0% "I shall send him poems and he will perhaps reply with a picture post card. But it is for that that I love him. I shall propose meeting—under a clock, by some Cross; and shall wait, and he will not come. It is for that that I love him. Oblivious, almost entirely ignorant, he will pass from my life. And I shall pass, incredible as it seems, into other lives; this is only an escapade perhaps, a prelude only."

December 17, 2016 –22.0% "Light almost pierced the thin swift waves as they raced fan-shaped over the beach. The girl who had shaken her head and made all the jewels, the topaz, the aquamarine, the water-coloured jewels with sparks of fire in them, dance, now bared her brows and with wide-opened eyes drove a straight pathway over the waves."

December 17, 2016 –26.0% "Words and words and words, how they gallop—how they lash their long manes and tails, but for some fault in me I cannot give myself to their backs; I cannot fly with them, scattering women and string bags. There is some flaw in me—some fatal hesitancy, which, if I pass it over, turns to foam and falsity. Yet it is incredible that I should not be a great poet."

December 18, 2016 –30.0% "Sealed and blind, with earth stopping my ears, I have yet heard rumours of wars; and the nightingale; have felt the hurrying of many troops of men flocking hither and thither in quest of civilization like flocks of birds migrating seeking the summer; I have seen women carrying red pitchers to the banks of the Nile. I woke in a garden, with a blow on the nape of my neck, [...] I am for ever sleeping and waking."

December 18, 2016 –35.0% "The sun fell in sharp wedges inside the room. Whatever the light touched became dowered with a fanatical existence. A plate was like a white lake. A knife looked like a dagger of ice. Suddenly tumblers revealed themselves upheld by streaks of light."

December 18, 2016 –38.0% "I have had one moment of enormous peace. This perhaps is happiness. Now I am drawn back by pricking sensations; by curiosity, greed (I am hungry) and the irresistible desire to be myself. I think of people to whom I could say things: Louis, Neville, Susan, Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am many-sided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet tonight, thank Heaven. Thank Heaven, I need not be alone."

December 18, 2016 –45.0% "‘It is Percival,’ said Louis, ‘sitting silent as he sat among the tickling grasses when the breeze parted the clouds and they formed again, who makes us aware that these attempts to say, “I am this, I am that,” which we make, coming together, like separated parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences."

December 20, 2016 –48.0% "‘Happiness is in it,’ said Neville, ‘and the quiet of ordinary things. A table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the pages. And the petal falling from the rose, and the light flickering as we sit silent, or, perhaps, bethinking us of some trifle, suddenly speak.’"

December 20, 2016 –49.0% "The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping."

December 20, 2016 –54.0% "We have been hauled over the shingle, down to the sea. The players come again. But they are mopping their faces. They are no longer so spruce or so debonair. I will go. I will set aside this afternoon. I will make a pilgrimage. I will go to Greenwich. I will fling myself fearlessly into trams, into omnibuses."

December 22, 2016 –58.0% "The activity is endless. And tomorrow it begins again; tomorrow we make Saturday. Some take train for France; others ship for India. Some will never come into this room again. One may die tonight. Another will beget a child. From us every sort of building, policy, venture, picture, poem, child, factory, will spring. Life comes; life goes; we make life. So you say."

December 22, 2016 –62.0% "I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found that story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?"

December 22, 2016 –68.0% "What dissolution of the soul you demanded in order to get through one day, what lies, bowings, scrapings, fluency and servility! How you chained me to one spot, one hour, one chair, and sat yourselves down opposite! How you snatched from me the white spaces that lie between hour and hour and rolled them into dirty pellets and tossed them into the waste-paper basket with your greasy paws. Yet those were my life."

December 27, 2016 –70.0% "‘Now sitting side by side,’ said Neville, ‘at this narrow table, now before the first emotion is worn smooth, what do we feel? Honestly now, openly and directly as befits old friends meeting with difficulty, what do we feel on meeting? Sorrow.'"

December 27, 2016 –71.0% "Beneath my eyes opens—a book; I see to the bottom; the heart—I see to the depths. I know what loves are trembling into fire; how jealousy shoots its green flashes hither and thither; how intricately love crosses love; love makes knots; love brutally tears them apart. I have been knotted; I have been torn apart."

December 29, 2016 –78.0% "‘What with the chorus, and the spinning water and the just perceptible murmur of the breeze we are slipping away. Little bits of ourselves are crumbling. There! Something very important fell then. I cannot keep myself together. I shall sleep. But we must go; must catch our train; must walk back to the station—must, must, must."

December 30, 2016 –83.0% "‘The tree alone resisted our eternal flux. For I changed and changed; was Hamlet, was Shelley, was the hero, whose name I now forget, of a novel by Dostoevsky; was for a whole term, incredibly, Napoleon; but was Byron chiefly."

January 1, 2017 –97.0% "And now I ask, “Who am I?” I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know."

January 2, 2017 –100.0% "‘And in me too the wave rises. It swells; it arches its back. I am aware once more of a new desire, something rising beneath me like the proud horse whose rider first spurs and then pulls him back. What enemy do we now perceive advancing against us, you whom I ride now, as we stand pawing this stretch of pavement? It is death. [...]'"

January 2, 2017 –Finished Reading

January 15, 2017 – Shelved as:stars-5

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