When Time Passes
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is the best book about nothing ever written. Fight me.
In Acadia National Park last week, I had a cocktail called the Lady of the Wood. It is my favorite all-time cocktail, and not only because it made me think of Virginia Woolf: wry (rye), complex, and smokey.1
From “Time Passes” in To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf:
At that season those who had gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky what message they reported or what vision they affirmed had to consider among the usual tokens of divine bounty--the sunset on the sea, the pallor of the dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other with handfuls of glass--something out of harmony with this jocundity and this serenity. There was a silent apparition of an ashen-coloured ship for instance, come, gone; there was a purplish stain upon the bland surface of the sea as if something had boiled and bled, invisibly, beneath. This intrusion into a scene calculated to stir the most sublime reflections and lead to the most comfortable conclusions stayed their pacing. It was difficult blandly to overlook them; to abolish their significance in the landscape; to continue, as one walked by the sea, to marvel how beauty outside mirrored beauty within.
Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror, and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.
[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.]
Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without interference. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierces by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.
In the spring the garden urns, casually filled with wind-blown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.
(In this story a family deserts their vacation house during WWI)
Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. —V.W.
This passage emphasizes one of the things Virginia Woolf is best at: sentence length and clarity. The first sentence I transcribed, which is 79 words long, doesn't read like a run on, but clearly and with lovely rhythm.
At that season <those who had gone down> to pace the beach (and ask) of the sea and sky (what message) they reported or what vision they affirmed <had to consider> among the usual tokens of divine bounty--the sunset on the sea, the pallor of the dawn, the moon rising, fishing-boats against the moon, and children making mud pies or pelting each other with handfuls of glass--<something out of harmony> with this jocundity and this serenity.
How? There are these nice little pockets of meterishness (like “gone down to pace the beach and ask of the sea and sky”). Like threads, verbs are connected to clauses over these pockets (like “and ask... what message”). These threads overlay one another: leaping over that little example I just gave is a bigger one: “those who had gone down... had to consider... something out of harmony.” At the risk of overcomplicating things, I marked up the “stitches” connecting these threads. And there are other threads in just this sentence, I think.
Woolf was great at short sentences, too.
Violets came and daffodils.
Just four words. But arranged in this pretty way (as opposed to “Violets and daffodils came”), she pushes the reader forward with nice meter. It also emphasizes the sequence (violets do literally bloom before daffodils, I'm pretty sure). And this is my segue to psychic distance...
Over the course of this excerpt, the narration is pivoting. At first it's unspecified inhabitants of the beach house (“those who had gone down to pace the beach”), but by the last transcribed paragraph we're reading through the experience of the house itself. Time speeds up. At the start of the excerpt a walk on the beach takes up several paragraphs. Later in four words violets have popped up and then daffodils. This speeding up of pacing helps Woolf think through one of the themes of the book: some things are short-lived and others seem never to end. This is also shown in the sentence in brackets, where something that was a big accomplishment for Mr Carmichael (who’s very insecure professionally) is mentioned like an aside.
There are some lovely word choices here. “Apparition” is one. This helps make it clear that the things out of harmony with nature are emblems of war, like warships looming on the horizon like specters. “Apparition” communicates this idea efficiently.
I really think To the Lighthouse is a phenomenal book, one written by a master in her long apex. “The rhythm of Woolf’s prose is to my ear the strongest and subtlest in fiction,” Ursula K Le Guin wrote.2 And Woolf herself said that, “style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words.”
I must be a lot of fun at parties… “hey this drink reminds me of a modernist author!”
I first met Virginia Woolf through Ursula K Le Guin’s The Wave in the Mind, and her Steering the Craft, two of my favorite books on writing.