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kassiani 's review for:
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty
Eudora Welty introduction :
on the setting : inspired by Saint Ives in Cornwall
"« The physical surround, so continuously before us in its changes, its weathers, its procession of day and night, so seducing in its beauty, is not here as itself. What Virginia Woolf has us see is the world as apparent to them—to Mrs. Ramsay, to Lily Briscoe, to James, Andrew, and the rest of the characters. »
« The interior of its characters’ lives is where we experience everything. And in the subjective—contrary to what so many authors find there—lies its clarity. There is nowhere in this radiant novel a shadow of detachment. Such is Virginia Woolf’s genius. The business of living goes on—stockings are knit, the Boeuf en Daube is cooked and served—and she is a genius with the homely, piercingly precise detail too. But if there is a pull and lure and threat from the outside world, other threats, other lures, are greater: those that search the characters more fatally, from within.
Here, with this houseful of family and summer guests, on these few miles of shore and sea, with Lighthouse, life has been intensified, not constricted, not lessened in range but given its expansion. Inside, in this novel’s multiple, time-affected view, is ever more boundless and more mysterious than Outside. »
« Love had a thousand shapes.” Love indeed pervades the whole novel. If reality is what looms, love is what pervades—so much so that it is quite rarely present in the specific; it is both everywhere and nowhere at a given time. »
« Set down here in the surround of the sea, on the spinning earth, caught up in the mysteries and the threat of time, the characters in their separate ways are absorbed in the wresting of order and sequence out of chaos, of shape out of what shifts and changes or vanishes before their eyes. The act of thinking, the act of using a brush dipped in greens and blues to set down “what I see” on a square of paper, the giving of human love, of making the moment something permanent, are all responses made at great risk (“risk” is the novel’s repeated word) to the same question, “What does it all mean? »
on the setting : inspired by Saint Ives in Cornwall
"« The physical surround, so continuously before us in its changes, its weathers, its procession of day and night, so seducing in its beauty, is not here as itself. What Virginia Woolf has us see is the world as apparent to them—to Mrs. Ramsay, to Lily Briscoe, to James, Andrew, and the rest of the characters. »
« The interior of its characters’ lives is where we experience everything. And in the subjective—contrary to what so many authors find there—lies its clarity. There is nowhere in this radiant novel a shadow of detachment. Such is Virginia Woolf’s genius. The business of living goes on—stockings are knit, the Boeuf en Daube is cooked and served—and she is a genius with the homely, piercingly precise detail too. But if there is a pull and lure and threat from the outside world, other threats, other lures, are greater: those that search the characters more fatally, from within.
Here, with this houseful of family and summer guests, on these few miles of shore and sea, with Lighthouse, life has been intensified, not constricted, not lessened in range but given its expansion. Inside, in this novel’s multiple, time-affected view, is ever more boundless and more mysterious than Outside. »
« Love had a thousand shapes.” Love indeed pervades the whole novel. If reality is what looms, love is what pervades—so much so that it is quite rarely present in the specific; it is both everywhere and nowhere at a given time. »
« Set down here in the surround of the sea, on the spinning earth, caught up in the mysteries and the threat of time, the characters in their separate ways are absorbed in the wresting of order and sequence out of chaos, of shape out of what shifts and changes or vanishes before their eyes. The act of thinking, the act of using a brush dipped in greens and blues to set down “what I see” on a square of paper, the giving of human love, of making the moment something permanent, are all responses made at great risk (“risk” is the novel’s repeated word) to the same question, “What does it all mean? »