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bedcarp 's review for:
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
three readings later and i'm still not entirely sure how to begin reviewing virginia woolf's to the lighthouse. in just 226 pages this book conveys and delicately touches on so many poignantly close truths and anxieties i've felt, and felt completely alone in feeling -- the loneliness and temporality of individual existence, the transient and inarticulate nature of human desire, the complexity of perception and so on. woolf writes with a poetic and distinctly impressionistic tone, her digressions and sojourns into the inner monologues of her characters flow with such natural ease, and the whole novel feels like an ode to the limits of our own ability to reconcile the ineffable mysteries that permeate existence, and the knowledge that that's okay. the magnum opus you spent your life working on will be forgotten, as will the portrait you spent 10 years realising, the families and lives you tried against all hope to bond together, even the most transcendental and lucid moments that occur once or twice in life will be subjected to the ravages of time -- no sooner than you've felt it it's already passed, leaving nothing behind but the vague impressions of a memory, distorted and slanted by the fallibility of our own perception.
i especially love the section "time passes" and how it captures the terrifying and inevitable forces of decay and age (the house eventually does get restored, but anyway) and the irrelevance of human agency in the face of time. i love how, within no more than 20 pages, woolf takes the idyllic carefreeness of "the window" and basically smashes it to bits. various characters die senseless and unjust deaths, robbed of any kind of valour or majesty and merely included as an afterthought. the beaches and seas now recall the desolation of war rather than the pastoral bliss commonly associated therein. by the time the ramsays and co. do reunite in "the lighthouse", the permeating feelings of grief and loneliness have come to the fore for all characters, as they each struggle to comprehend the impossibility of complete understanding, both of one another and the world around them, as well as the vague and mutable nature of their ambitions and the irrelevance of human achievement in the face of the universe.
still, perhaps we're not meant to understand any of it, or find a way to cheat time. perhaps being able to experience the world and life and partake in its infinite complexities with our own set of eyes to perceive whatever we so choose, to discover the answer in the attempt to connection, to realise the only knowable truth is nothing but what we make of it -- perhaps that's enough. it's the journey to the lighthouse, after all, that misty and amorphous figure at the other end of the shore casting circles of light into our field of vision, that keeps us going through our day to day existence, not the tangible concrete structure that the ramsays eventually reach at the end of the book. and likewise, every trip to the lighthouse thus far has left me with something different each reading, some new takeaway about life, some vague comfort i didn't realise i needed. to the lighthouse is a book about nothing and everything at the same time. it might just change your life.
i especially love the section "time passes" and how it captures the terrifying and inevitable forces of decay and age (the house eventually does get restored, but anyway) and the irrelevance of human agency in the face of time. i love how, within no more than 20 pages, woolf takes the idyllic carefreeness of "the window" and basically smashes it to bits. various characters die senseless and unjust deaths, robbed of any kind of valour or majesty and merely included as an afterthought. the beaches and seas now recall the desolation of war rather than the pastoral bliss commonly associated therein. by the time the ramsays and co. do reunite in "the lighthouse", the permeating feelings of grief and loneliness have come to the fore for all characters, as they each struggle to comprehend the impossibility of complete understanding, both of one another and the world around them, as well as the vague and mutable nature of their ambitions and the irrelevance of human achievement in the face of the universe.
still, perhaps we're not meant to understand any of it, or find a way to cheat time. perhaps being able to experience the world and life and partake in its infinite complexities with our own set of eyes to perceive whatever we so choose, to discover the answer in the attempt to connection, to realise the only knowable truth is nothing but what we make of it -- perhaps that's enough. it's the journey to the lighthouse, after all, that misty and amorphous figure at the other end of the shore casting circles of light into our field of vision, that keeps us going through our day to day existence, not the tangible concrete structure that the ramsays eventually reach at the end of the book. and likewise, every trip to the lighthouse thus far has left me with something different each reading, some new takeaway about life, some vague comfort i didn't realise i needed. to the lighthouse is a book about nothing and everything at the same time. it might just change your life.