(Reply to Lori)
I am overjoyed by your new bandwagon of the Englightenment, by the way. We never got round to talking much about our reactions to this essay, which I think differed more than they usually do. There were a couple of points were I saw things differently; although, of course, the rest was pretty much the standard double-response of cojoined minds..!

Your reaction to one section I found interesting: “[Books] are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.” You wanted to burn him in effigy for this (!) because you saw it as rejecting, or more accurately as devaluing, what had come before, as if he was arguing that we should be separate from the ideas in books - separate systems, not orbiting around others' ideas. I can see your point, and it is a valid and a good one. But I suppose I was reading this from the point of view of a scholar talking to other scholars, younger scholars, in whom he is trying to stir up the fire of inspiration to continue their work as scholars proudly, without being swayed by the public opinion that scholars are as base (!!!) as women (where, similarly, I have an eloquent Anne Fadiman-esque "grrr" in the margin). He sees books as inspiration, as I am sure you do too. And he does give weight to their ideas, but as the product of the world around, and not to be valued more than experience, which I think is also a valid point. In this comment above, I see him urging the young scholars in the lecture hall to have the courage to challenge and to respond to the ideas that have gone before them, set down so authoritatively in books: to stand your ground in your own orbit (your own experience of the world and your own ideas), allowing yourself to be inspired by new ideas and provoked to new thoughts, but not swayed so drastically out of your own orbit by others' ideas that you no longer have a basis of your own opinion. His point in other parts of the essays seems to back this up, especially in his insistance that these young scholars should not shrink from attempting to write their own ideas. Books can be daunting things to young scholars, tombs of wisdom set down in black-and-white and not to be challenged. But what he is saying is: challenge them if you want to; don't be afraid to pick up the pen; these books were written by men and were the products of the thoughts of men -- you too are men and can change the world with your thoughts. It may seems as though he is undervaluing the importance of books, but I think instead he is encouraging the next generation of scholars not to shrink from their task to set down new ideas, to move forward in thought and time. Even you and I, when we read a book and identify with it to such an extent that it inspires us to change some of our ideas, go through a modification process in those ideas. We respect the words set down in books by scholars of the past, but this respect is not worship, and it would be wrong for us to be swept out of our own orbits, to use Emerson's metaphor, by every powerful book we read, so that at once we would be agreeing with Burke, while in a moment we would be swept out of those ideas by Paine. We have to bring our own judgement to bear on these things. We cannot blindly follow the opinions set down in books, because they are just that: opinions. I think that is what Emerson is pointing to when he says that books are the products of men's thoughts, and should not be worshipped as idols or statues of the men whom they represent. What would the study of literature be if books were meant to sweep us out of our own orbit with their ideas, so that we no longer had our own set of beliefs to judge with? There would be no criticism, no interpretation, no argument. Granted, we shouldn't shun them based on our views, but we should be able to remain objective, feet on the ground, able to evaluate and criticise. How else are the scholars of each new age meant to form new ideas? Each age brings a different idea to the forum, and we must use the ideas that came before us and combine these with our experience of the world, allowing us to develop new ways of seeing reality. You said "Our own orbits are rather too weak to continue ad infinitum without the help of others to inspire us." But Emerson himself says that books are meant to inspire us. They are meant to allow us to develop our own orbit, but nevertheless remain our own system, with our own gravitational pull, rather than orbitting blindly around others' stars. We would risk turning into Dorothea, blindly orbitting around Casaubon's star, unable to reject his learning as inadequate because it was set in stone as reliable. Emerson doesn't want scholars to be stars burning on their own light alone: his whole philosophy is that we must develop the ideas set before us - those we experience for ourselves in the world around us, and those we read in books. We have to burn brighter for the inspiration that these combined elements give us, but not abandon our own minds, our own souls, by our blind acceptance of others' ideas.

Besides, if you were swung out of your orbit by what everyone wrote, you would have blindly agreed with Emerson and been unable to voice these criticisms. I suppose you could accuse me of doing that, but I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, and I am allowing his words to inspire my own thoughts, not to guide me in my thinking towards complete agreement. The only book in the world that should do that is the Bible, and even then we are encouraged to think for ourselves, learn as much as we can, so that we believe instead of blindly accepting every written word.

Wow, that was longer than I thought it would be!

Emerson's argument seems to be on the side of inspiring creativity. These scholars, he argues, have to set out on their own paths and think for themselves. When he says that books are for the scholar's idle times, I agree that that devalues books a little too much, but he is talking about the importance of experiencing the world. He is talking about the criticism of scholars as stuck in their closets. He has a point when he harps on about experience, I think. Scholars can tend to have their noses in books too much (and his criticism of bibliophiles is a criticism of people who never appear from books to experience the world, and are thus stuck in others' ideas rather than allowing them to spark or inspire their own) and scholars can tend to reject experience in favour of the ideas presented in books. But this is the wrong attitude to take. He rightly comments, I think, that books are written as a result of other people's experiences, whether these experiences include inspiration and learning from other books or not, and that, therefore, when we read someone else's book, we are taking part in their experience. It is useful to us to read these things, it is inspiring and can produce knowledge. But for a scholar, whose purpose in life is to advance knowledge and stimulate the world with new ideas, what use is it for her/him to only rely on other peoples' experiences of the world? Again, there is a parellel to Middlemarch. Mr Casaubon's career as a scholar fails chiefly because he has his head stuck in books and never experiences the world for himself. It turns out that his Keys to the Mythologies are merely a regurtitation of things that have already been said, because he has relied so heavily on books. Dorothea's disillusionment with his work is that it is insubstantial - it doesn't have any relation to the world... it is dull and unimportant. In saying that books are for the scholar's idle times, Emerson implies that books are of secondary importance, and perhaps they are. But it doesn't mean they are unimportant. It means there are two types of experience. There is active experience - seeing the world for yourself, experimenting, talking, interpreting, living. And then there is the time when you are not being active (idle tends to have negative connotations of laziness, but it can mean not physically active, although I agree it is the wrong word here), and then books are the key. Emerson advocates a balance--one in favour of experience, but one in which books do play a vital role.

Finally, I don't think that Emerson was calling for a rejection of European learning and of the past ages. I think he is encouraging the American students to have the confidence to think for themselves; he wants them to be able to move forward with a new age instead of worrying about living up to ideas of the past. It was an age of revolution for them. He talks of the "historic glories of the old" alongside the "rich possibilities of the new," encouraging the American Scholar to reach into the past for inspiration, and use that and the present experience to strive boldly and bravely into the possibilities of a new world, a new knowledge. Yes, he was calling for a revolution of New England academics, but back then that was all that existed of American academics, and there was a need to insist on that revolution in order to create an American intellectual world that was brave enough to stand up to the needs of any academic world. He didn't want the New England academics to live in the past, learning what aristocratic European scholars had said and reciting line by line, heralding it as the all-encompassing truth and burying their noses in books of past glory. Rather, his speech was a rallying cry to the American intellectuals to have courage to look forward and have faith in their own powers of perception and intelligence. I don't think Emerson was ignoring other orbits; rather, I think he was trying to give confidence to this new one - the American orbit, which needed its own system, taking into account the old, but embracing the new. You are right about the cultural stagnation of America at the time, and Emerson had to change that with powerful words, even if those words were a challenge to the old European system - they needed to inspire these American Scholars towards confidence in their own ability to face the future and discover something new.

I was interested in Emerson’s emphasis on independence, not so much because I agree with it (although to a certain extent I do), but rather because I find it interesting that it permeates everything that he talks about. At the beginning of the speech he talks about how “man” (in the sense of humankind, I suppose—or is that “I hope”?) is divided into various functions, which I found interesting because that is actually a Biblical concept, even though he never makes that link. Anyway, he talks about how those functions have become disjointed—how there is disunity among “Man.” This is interesting given his later praise if individualism and independence, but he seems to see independence as a necessary component to unity, as if all the cogs have to be able to work on their own in order to work well as a system. It might be a stark way of looking at life, but it’s a good analogy, I think (one that God thought up first, in a way!!)

I will quote some bits I liked:

“Science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts”

“The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind, and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of the mind from which it issued, so high does it soar, so long does it sing.”

“Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.”

I think he is actually praising books here, not looking down on them. I like the way he talks of books as inspiration, as truth made out of life. It’s as if he likens the scholar’s work in reading a book to taking part in a conversation: when the scholar reads the book, s/he is listening to the conversation, but part of her must also be preparing a response, thinking about the ideas put forward by the text and bringing her own mind to it – giving it “the new arrangement of [her] own mind” and then re-uttering it from her point of view. Truth is subjective, and the work of a scholar (or, in our terms, perhaps, a reader and writer) is to take part in a neverending conversation of ideas, of the world (nature) and the past (thoughts of others in books) creating new truths in each age.

I think his negative remarks about “the bookworm” and “the book-learned class” stem from his view that worship of the book itself puts too much emphasis on the thing, not as a product of thought and ultimately nature, but as a think to be worshipped itself. We must remember that all writers were human, and their thoughts come from the same place – the world around them and the inspiration of others. He links this to the education system, and stresses that there is a danger that students will be taught to consume other people’s knowledge (books) for their own sake, without having their own thoughts.

I admit he does get a little hard on books, for instance: “Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.” But he has a point I think. And he goes on to praise the importance of these books, using the proverb (which I love): “A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful” – Books should be used to inspire – their thoughts to alight our souls to thoughts (fig to inspire the ripening of fig), but never relied upon exclusively, to the exclusion of nature and God and the world around us. We must all be creators and experiencers as well as readers.

“It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books. They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.”

I love this – it is very true. And perhaps my favourite:”There is some awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said.”

Don’t you often feel like that? And how wonderful to feel that we are connected by thought to these great authors because we can identify the same universal feeling.

And I wonder what broth of shoes would taste like… Never mind, I’d rather not know…

“One must be an inventor to read well.”

And then here is something you must have underlined and related to. I have a big Yes! Written beside it, underlined four times:

“But they [colleges] can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, but the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.”

I like that. Education should be about inspiration, not about drilling knowledge.

“Only so much do I know, as I have lived.”

It’s as if he is noting two different types of knowledge: book-knowledge (does that have Maggie Tulliver written all over it?!) and life-knowledge. He believes that action is life, and that truth comes from life, and so should books – so we should read them as a source of life too, but not as the only source.

And I loved this.

“The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now mattes of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions,--with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The new deed is yet a part of life,--remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought in the mind.”

Do you think this is true? It has a Virginia Woolf-esque parallel to it – this idea that we are unable to separate ourselves from the here and now, the current in our life, our present. What was it she said about that?? Then I was thinking, I wonder if this is why Hemingway and other expats find it so difficult to write about the place they are in; why they must return home or move on to write about it. I wonder if this is why I also have that issue. Or perhaps that’s to do with romance of place. Anyway, I would like to think more on this idea and know your thoughts too.

“Life is our dictionary.”

What a lovely motto. They should put that somewhere on a wall in the Liberal Arts building.

And the recognition of your own soul in someone else’s writing prompts the exclamation:” This is my music; this is myself.”

And then a wonderfully one suited for the cynical among us: “The world is his, who can see through its pretension”

I also liked his observations on the movement of literary and philosophical thought into more modern ideas of focusing on the every-day—what was once thought mundane: “One of these signs is the fact, that the same movement which effected the elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature a very marked and as benign an aspect., Instead of the sublime and the beautiful; the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which as been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts.”

Isn’t that a harbinger for what was to come in literature throughout the next few decades and on?

And a quote for how relative everything in this world is: “The drop is a small ocean.”

And the last one: “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.”

So there’s a challenge for you.

I am seized, today, with one of those all-encompassing passions to read and learn and understand everything. It is a false feeling, at the heart of it, because I have no particular interest in the classification of insects, for example, or the convoluted algorithms elegised so gracefully by the greatest mathematicians, who, I can’t help but thinking, have very dry lives to get so excited about numbers. This desire to read is a desire, really, to consume the thoughts of others and to thereby reach another plain of thought for oneself, like grasping at understanding of another human mind which opens up a whole avenue of possibilities without a roadmap or street signs. We take our first few ginger steps down that road without a compass, and as the words unfold we make our directional decisions based on the light falling on the path at our feet or the glow of the horizon in the distance. We may step back, retreat a few steps, or be forcibly pulled back into our own stark reality by the call of a voice asking us to set the table or clear our books from the living room table, and then all the ideas that were so grand, so we thought, forming themselves little by little with a paintbrush at our fingertips, recede suddenly into the background, and we awake, as if from a dream, forgetting the cause of our drum-beating heart and quickened breath that was so real to us in those last few moments of unconsciousness.

That feeling of being on the brink of something great, but then finding it rather small and inconsequential, is in itself an idea that seems so grand because it is so identifiable when we see it written on a page, as if our own experiences and hearts and minds were noticed and penned 90 years ago by a suicidal woman who wandered the paths (and grasses) at Cambridge.

“Thought – to call it by a prouder name that it deserved – had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until – you know the little tug – the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating… But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property of its kind – put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still.”

This thought, this fish that Virginia Woolf catches on her line and lays out on the grass, gets lost at the interruption of reality – in the form of a Oxbridge Beadle – and for all its former grandeur is let off the hook to swim again in that vast river – or ocean – of darting and silvery ideas that seem so often to slip through our fingers when we reach into the water after one, now wary of our grasping hands and ready to play the game of hide but not seek. Too often my fish swim back into the river, growing larger and thrashing around in my mind, seeming all-important, but never allowing me to lay them out on the grass for inspection and use.

The presence of so many fish in my pond is disturbing, a suggestion of a life that may be lived without catching them all, and my only comfort is that I have many years left to keep baiting my hook. They are of various shapes and sizes. Some are tiny goldfish, not even vaguely significant but slight flashes of orange that flitter by when you least expect to notice them. Some are elaborate koi carp, displaying all their contrasting colours with a flash of the tail. Most are tiny silver fish that you miss except for in the sunlight, but which make the water grey and dense with their multitudinous movement. Some are books that need to be read. Some are tasks that need to be accomplished. Others are projects that want to be attempted. There is a novel in there – a large, bright, daring fish that likes to bite the bait with a false lip, cheekily letting go just as I feel the excitement of a tug on the line. I know he’s there – that sly, scaly creature; he taunts me. He is the fish that would taste better than all, the type of fish to be served to a king or spread amongst five thousand. He is a specimen. But that is his way – he likes to taunt me with these illusions of his grandeur without ever showing himself, so that my expectations grow each time he tugs on that line, and my disappointment is constant when my eyes, once again, are barred from the sight of his magnificent tail and cold stare. I am sure that, like Virginia Woolf’s fish, once he was spread out on the grass I would toss him back in again because of his relative insignificance, lying there on the vast expanse of green grass, and me not knowing what to do with him – how to kill, gut, and cook him, with his beady eyes staring at me. I think to myself, in a falsely comforting way, that he is more productive left to grow in the water until I have prepared the meal, the accompaniments, until I have learned to cook properly; and I will toss the fish pellets into the water, hoping he will feed and grow, so that when I do catch the little bugger, he will be succulent and rewarding.

Unfortunately, the fish pellets make the other fish grow, too. And breed. My fish won’t stop breeding.

~~~~

The past is signified as the illusion. The present is the truth. This is the way the world works. Woolf cites Tennyson and Rossetti as paragons of a bygone era of beautiful poetry, when people hummed under their breath at dinner parties and there was no gunfire to reveal the stark ugliness of reality and turn poetry into something too true to be enjoyed, yet.

“The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at that moment.”

Because the purpose of poetry is to create another world outside of our own, one made romantic in an imaginary, illusive world of the past—poetry that tugs on the sleeve of familiarity without exerting us to analyse our own ‘here and now’s, our present position. We are meant to identify with poetry, but with its timeless qualities—love, hate, loss—not the jarring present. Such poetry becomes a exposition; a light bulb pulled down over us in an interview chamber, designed to shed light on reality, on the truth. We don’t want poetry to tell us the truth. That is why the murmur, the musical humming, before the war was no longer heard at luncheons after the war. The war was an act of stark light—the light of gunfire and shell-fire—on the ugliness of reality, so that the illusive and romantic world before the war, “the illusion which inspired Tennyson and Christina Rossetti to sing so passionately about the coming of their loves,” was exposed as just an illusion. How can you go back to an illusion – to the luxury of musical humming at luncheons – when that world has been exposed as false? Truth always has a way of knocking down the doors of illusion, and once it has been admitted into the entrance hall, there is no way to pretend it has never visited. You can’t ignore the calling card. The world becomes a different place.

And yet Woolf brings up an interesting point: “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?” There is always a natural tendency to assume that truth – that magnificent world encompassing all that is just and right and perfect – is better than illusion. Sometimes it is too jarring, too hurtful, too real. The truth hurts, so they say. Ask the happy wife whose friend discloses a husband’s infidelity. But in the case of war, the truth exposed is one of ugliness and futility and desperation. It is not a clearing of the land in front of you to expose the truth of continuing. It is a mass of tangled branches exposed as impossible to traverse without pain and the unremitting question: why even continue? So truth, in this case, is in no way just and right and perfect. The wife may some day be grateful for the knowledge of her husband’s affair, for she is faced with a life she has been leading that was made a mockery of, an existence that becomes an embarrassment, with all the falsities and lies she endured without knowing it. But life before the war was not a mockery of truth; rather, it was a blissful ignorance of ugliness and desperation. “Which was truth and which was illusion, I asked myself?” Perhaps the illusion was the truth—the truth of illusive happiness and musical humming.

And so from that deep thought to a flash of colour, even in the aftermath of the war:

“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window pains like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish… the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

The image is like realising what you had when you are about to lose it. Perhaps a feeling the husband experiences when, having taken his wife for granted for so many years, suddenly sees in her foliage the beauty of purples and golds, realising only as they are just out of reach that he has had such beauty in his life.

And then to humour:

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well. The lamp in the spine does not light on beef and prunes.”

And the end of a day:

“It was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky.”

And my favourite:

“If truth is not to be found on the shelves of the British Museum, where, I asked myself, picking up my notebook and a pencil, is truth?”

Interesting that she doesn’t find truth on the shelves of the British Museum, just more questions and scribbles on paper that elucidate an idea, but not a truth. So the question remains, where is truth? It is not on the shelves of the British Museum. It is not to be grasped anywhere, perhaps. And isn’t that a good thing, since truth can be so destructive to the musical humming of illusion?

London is a machine:

“London was like a workshop. London was like a machine. We were all being shot backwards and forwards on this plain foundation to make some pattern.”

So London is weaving a tapestry of lives. And at the end of the day this tapestry has advanced only a few stages:

“It was as if the great machine after labouring all day had made with our help a few yards of something very exciting and beautiful – a fiery fabric flashing with red eyes, a tawny monster roaring with hot breath.”

London is creating a vicious but beautiful monster in its weaving – it is creating something that will get out of its control, eventually, perhaps.

And did you know that you are “the most discussed animal in the universe”?

And back to the task of reading all those books – it would apparently take elephants and those eight-legged creatures to achieve my goal: “the animals that are reputed longest lived and most multitudinously eyed.” But then, of course, it is not just about reading the books, but about gleaning “the essential oil of truth” and “extracting pure nuggets of the essential ore.” Reading for information is likened to the fundamentally practical search for our most essential raw materials, an extraction process that is at its heart a task of refining and purifying the discovery until it achieves its most useful properties. The properties are there, in the most “pure nuggets,” but amongst them is a dirty array of black rock and crumbling but stubborn sediment. Reading for truth is like sieving flour for sugar.

But what Woolf finds in her search for these pure nuggets is that, unlike the student combing through the science book for facts, the quest for a more philosophical truth—a search for an answer to a complex question of social and moral import like women and fiction—is one that has no definable path, one that actually elucidates more questions rather than succinct answers:

“It was impossible to make head or tail of it all, I decided, glancing with envy at the reader next door who was making the neatest abstracts, headed often with an A or a B or a C, while my own notebook rioted with the wildest scribble of contradictory jottings. It was distressing, it was bewildering, it was humiliating. Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.”

But the truth that she is searching for is not one she will find answered in books. It is one she has to find between the lines of what she finds on the shelves of the British Museum. In fact, it is a truth she finds through her own emotions rather than through the cold words of the patriarchs who write about women’s inconstancy and inferiority. It is a truth she finds subtly through her own reactions to these texts: through her anger, traced back to their anger. Truth, for Woolf, and for many of us who aren’t seeking mathematical truth (which, to call it truth, is perhaps unclear, since truth implies the possibility of an opposite, of falsehood in mathematics, which is surely not possible in a world of certainties) truth is found through our own souls, through staring into the waters, as Woolf does, where she finds:

“it swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it….”

And then it pops up and we reel it in, and the catch is so much more impressive and fundamental to us because it is produced through our own thought processes rather than explained to us through the words of a patriarch on a black and white page. I am not arguing for the uselessness of books; on the contrary, for it is in her reaction to the books that Woolf finds the spark of an idea. What is important is the conversation we have with the ideas put forward in books. There has to be a give and take, and when the book gives, you have to be able to take and give back, allowing your own mind to grasp hold of what you are learning and then, and then, use that new material to expand the ideas stored in there, interrelating them with others. The ideas that we gain from the world around us are not those that we are force fed by our reading, but those that come to us gradually, perhaps from what the psychologists would call our unconscious, the purloined letter:

“Drawing pictures was an idle way of finishing an unprofitable morning’s work. Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

It is by psychoanalysing her own drawings as a response to her reading that Woolf is able to find the root cause of her reaction and let the seed planted by the words she has read germinate into an idea – an idea that reveals itself to her reader in a way that mirrors her own escalating realisation of it—a truth:

“All these books… had been writing in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”
“Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with is own superiority. That was what he was protecting rather hot-headedly and with too much emphasis, because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price.”
“By feeling that one has some innate superiority, it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney—for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination—over other people.”
“Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”

That last quotation has to be one of my favourites of all time. I find myself reciting it aloud in an attempt to impress it upon my memory, a futile attempt, I might add, since I have never succeeded in that field of memorization on demand.

And then light humour again:

“There was another ten-shilling note in my purse; I noticed it, because it is a fact that still takes my breath away – the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open it and there they are.”

I am enchanted by her comments on the absurdity of paper money: “Society gives me chicken and coffee, bed and lodging, in return for a certain number of pieces of paper…”

And then the chapter concludes with the age-old idea, somehow made as fresh as a new thought, a new idea, ever again to anyone who reads this wonderful little book, that money is the key for independence: For women, money means independence from men.

“Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.”

Women need men for security (in the form of money), and are ordered by a history of patriarchs to worship men (serving, of course, as they are expected, as the mirror in which they see themselves at twice their natural size). However, with money, women no longer depend on men and can see the world with the freedom of their own eyes. The reverse is also implied here, of course: that men have blocked the view of the world (from the sky down to the worms in the grass) from women for centuries.

And then the chapter closes with an insightful forward-glance into our time (or, to be exact, 2014, one hundred years after Woolf was writing), in which she envisions a world of equality, where women will “have ceased to be the protected sex.” Is this true? I don’t think so. Yes, women do “take part in all the activities and exertions that were once denied to them,” from driving an engine to heaving coal. But the idea that women need protecting, that they are the weaker sex, is still a symptom of the mirror-syndrome, a way men can make themselves appear stronger in the mirror. It may not be a socially acceptable ideal anymore, but men still claim natural superiority over women in the expectation that they will propose, hold the door, book the tickets, drive the car, buy the house, earn the money, settle the accounts. And there are still some women for whom “womanhood” is still an “occupation” that they revel in.

Interestingly enough, though, women are still more prevalent than aeroplanes.