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.