Voicesyesvoices

You've all got me thinking about language. The worst possible view of language is as structure and words, or grammar and lexicon, which is how it\"s usually taught. No wonder we are so poor at learning other languages. Language in fact cannot be separated from intention and context, and from knowing how to read those; or from bodily and facial movements, postures, gestures, tones, as well as the settings of light and landscape that are such a crucial part of the expressiveness of remembered scenes. Moreover, all of these elements are constantly in motion. Virginia Woolf captures all of this miraculously and with astonishing subtlety, as if modeling for us the art of living with all the pores of our consciousness open, and not just the square tunnel leading into our chambers of reason. Living with such openness, like reading Woolf, can be intense and exhausting, best in small quantities at a time, since one cannot be carried along comfortably on the shoulders of linear narrativ...

 Mrs. Ramsay repeats to herself, "Children don't forget, children don't forget" after her thought is presented as follows in chapter XI of To the Lighthouse: "No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out – a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress – children never forget." He is James, Mrs. Ramsay's son. From her perspective, he cuts out images from books to keep his memories in static pictures. He finds extraordinary joy in doing so because "to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystalize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests." But children will forget, I believe so. To wit, James' desire to collect images results from a wheel of sensations, which evokes incessant motion. In other words, he cuts out images to remember what sparked joy in him, not to keep in mind anything with a specific meaning. Sensations fleet a...

  In the fourth chapter of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , we are told that, "Mr. Bankes was alive to things which would not have struck him had not those sandhills revealed to him the body of his friendship [with Mr. Ramsay]." This revelation took place during his “dumb colloquy with the sand dunes.” How does a sandhill relate to Mr. Bankes’ consideration of his lost friendship with Mr. Ramsay? Instead of a one-sided metaphorical recollection, I was struck that what takes place is described as a conversation between the dunes and Mr. Bankes. The dunes are speaking. But why does Woolf use the sand dune, what does this add to an understanding of this friendship and Mr. Bankes himself?  As a child, I would spend hours at a time walking along sand dunes in Northern California. Dunes can offer stunning views of the ocean, some protection from the biting sea breeze, and that lovely whistling sound when the wind blows through them. To walk on a sand dune, you connect with the ...

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, reveal...

  In Chapter Twelve of To The Lighthouse, Woolf shows an interesting dynamic between Mr and Mrs. Ramsey:  "He Should be very proud of Andrew if he got a scholarship, he said. She would be just as proud of him if he didn't, she answered. They disagreed always about this, but it did not matter. She liked him to believe in scholarships, and he liked her to be proud of Andrew whatever he did." I often hate the concept of agreeing to disagree. When we argue with someone, and, if we care about them, shouldn't we try to come to an agreement regarding important matters? Shouldn't we agree on the values we hold? In this passage, Woolf suggests otherwise: in serious relationships--especially in marriage--agreeing to disagree is a very healthy thing.  One of the things I admire most about Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey's relationship is their ability to keep each other independent. I feel like despite mar...

For some reason, I have difficulty accessing my posts. So, although I see there are new comments it might be difficult for me to reply to them. Sorry about that! --------------------------------------------- We talked a little bit about Lily and her artistic eyes in our last class. I am especially interested in that. To me, it seems that her artistic eyes give her a special ability--the ability to see the unity or wholeness in the world, if not of the world. This is revealed to us by several paragraphs, especially the following two paragraphs in chapter 9 (my chapters might be numbered a little bit differently though):      "And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one...

  So far, having read the first five chapters of  To The Lighthouse , Virginia Woolf’s story-telling strikes me as being primarily focused on showing the distinct stream of consciousness that the characters experience within themselves, about other people they are related to or about themselves. Through this, we become acquainted with the characters, not only by a character’s thinking but also by other people’s thinking about the subject. So Virginia Woolf presents her characters through many lenses, each lens bringing its subjective view.                An instance of this phenomenon happens when Mrs. Ramsay immerses herself in her thoughts and as a result, we become acquainted with her concerns like how “shrubby” the household is or with that memory that gave her a strong impression—namely the one about her Swiss maid who while crying for the death of her father remarked that “The mountains are so beautiful”(28)...

The problem with zoom is that I have to mean what I say.  I have to talk about my thoughts and feelings like I know what they are.  I'm struggling right now to explain to you all that I don't know but you would know it if you were here.  You would see my hands clench my teeth clench my heart clench.  You would know my smile even if my face did not move.  On zoom I have to smile BIGGER, nod BIGGER, be BIGGER. I am astounded by Woolf's ability to show us exactly how people are communicating without words, even as she shares the words they say. The young couple in Kew Gardens has a connection that is expressed through their hands on a parasol, digging in the dirt. They talk about tea but the clumsy words are not connected to their feelings. Communication is so much more than talking, but in our technological world we act like we are all still connected. We can talk. We can see each others' faces. But we cannot communicate. The silence that the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay b...

  Green & Blue is an event of light and color. There is no clear narrative content, but the story (or prose poem) is more than just a list of things that are green and blue. It's an impressionist painting being described, a diverse spectrum of the forms that color can inhabit and the ways color and form can be envisioned. Green begins as an adjectival characteristic, but it isn’t just the color of the glass—it becomes an imaginative experience. The pools of green light on the table transition to the feathers of birds and their cries, then palm trees are glittering in the sun. Then the pools are in a desert, with camels. Color is an arc connecting forms, from the feathers and skin of animals to mirages in the heat. These things are subjective within the mind of the reader—all the deserts pictured vary among individuals, as do shades of green, but it allows both interpretation and a particular color and scene to be painted in each individual mind.   Color is changeable withi...

“Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....” ( The Mark on the Wall , p. 3) Although this paragraph does not fit precisely into my general examination, I find it a fitting introduction and foil to the portrait of the afterlife Ms. Woolf will show us. We are the train hurtling through a dark tunnel, we find ourselves turned into brown paper parcels in a post office shoot. As our hair flies back we lose all our hairpins (and I suppose everything else) until we are shot out at the feet of God stark naked. Perhaps the und...

      In Virginia Woolf’s short story, A Haunted House , the house seems to hold a kind of memory. Not only that, it holds the emotion and love of its previous inhabitants; it holds spirit both figuratively and literally.       I often wonder about how places possess a kind of spirit or energy about them. In German, there is a word  called zeitgeist , meaning spirit of the times ( zeit =time and geist =spirit). In imagining this word I like to imagine a literal spirit who goes around affecting a people’s character. In the roaring twenties, there was the zeitgeist of economic prosperity and daring self expression. It caused people to defy prohibition and experiment with new styles of dancing and dressing. During the founding of America, as we read from Tocqueville, there was a zeitgeist of industry, equality, and freedom that rendered the people of America with strong values and work ethic.       Similar to zeit...

One may find it unchallenging to notice incoherence and tediousness when one reads the story of Kew Garden. I am not an exception. Yes, I confusedly asked myself, "What does she think she is doing?" when I could not demystify how a collection of unrelated moments is called a story. I didn't find any logic in this kind of story-telling. Then I refused to understand what she intends to convey from a disconnection. Such as the descriptions of a flower-bed, the movements of a goal-oriented snail, the conversation of a married couple about their past, the disharmonious behaviors of two men, the complicated and nearly senseless dialogue of two elderly women after they scrutinize the older man's back, and the like. Therefore, I started seeking what stood out in my mind when reading this non-sense. I saw the flowers embellished with a variety of colors and the snail marked with its hard-working attitude. I saw nature rolling in beauty while people are being laid back and not ...

Landres   The Narrator and Mrs. Ramsay on a Train “ [W]e were torn asunder, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train [...]” (“The Mark on the Wall,” 1). The narrators in the writings of Virginia Woolf take on the perspective of an observer looking out of a train window as the locomotive rushes past scenes. The narrator fixes her gaze on that object which presents itself to it and turns its attention to the next object as soon as it has presented itself, leaving the first behind. This pattern of appearance, fixation, and digression in the narrator’s mind mirrors that in the characters’ minds. In To the Lighthouse , for example, this pattern is played out in the mind the narrator and in that Mrs. Ramsay when Mr. Tansley tags along on her errands. Mr. Tansley has just begun to be roused from his ill-humor by Mrs. Ramsay’s encouragement and implicit flat...

  Both Kew Gardens and the Mark on the Wall are told around a snail or at least have a snail as one important anchor of their storytelling. I wonder if Woolf did that on purpose; and whether it is possible for us to consider the change of the snail as the change of Woolf herself or the style of her writing.   The role of the two snails might be similar, but they fulfill this role in different ways. In Kew Gardens, the snail has an external, worldly, and real existence. From its first appearance on stage, the reader knows the snail as the snail. Its external, worldly, and real existence is its identity—identity to itself, to the narrator, and to the readers. What is more, this snail has an actual movement. This movement is not only spatial but also chronological. One might even say that it is the chronological movement of the snail that gives the rest of the story—both the other characters and events—a chronological order, a sense of time. The snail carries with it the en...

 "Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere."  Music Score Music Video Enjoy <3 Maxfield Fleishman

" Thus one couple after another with much the same irregular and aimless movement passed the flower-bed and were enveloped in layer after layer of green blue vapour, in which at first their bodies had substance and a dash of colour, but later both substance and colour dissolved in the green-blue atmosphere. How hot it was! So hot that even the thrush chose to hop, like a mechanical bird, in the shadow of the flowers, with long pauses between one movement and the next; instead of rambling vaguely the white butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul. Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon,...