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2006-01-30
Virginia Woolf (b. Adeline Virginia Stephen)
B. 1.25.1882 London / D. 3.28.1941 River Ouse, Sussex
Suicide / Drowning
I have just come from a lecture on modernist literature delivered in Manhattan by one of my old English professors at college. This was the first college-related event I've attended since leaving college 23 years ago. My hopes were accordingly unrealistic and high. If in these many years I�d been to other alumni events, or even one, I�d have been prepared for what there in the thick of it suddenly loomed: the plain fact that everybody was at least as interested in the other attendees as in the topic.
Me too.
Besides the professor I didn�t recognize anyone, again maybe something that happens at alumni events but I wasn�t prepared for the disappointment. Then one guy who came in looking 60 had a name-tag that dated him to the class before mine, filling me with horror as I realized I could be looking at old friends and not know them. And naturally I�d filled several idle moments picturing a subtle after-crowd invitation, with subsequent bon-mots delivered�a wee wishy-wish I might have snuffed had I held other alumni events in my memory.
I could have used the mental space for a better daydream.
Strange to say, amid all my false imaginings of my first alumni event I never imagined standing up to ask a question�and in fact when questions were invited, I did not. I blame a little my situation, seating-wise, book-ended by two women were wandering south of Lincoln Center; one sweated thunderclouds of flowery perfume from pink cashmere.
My Femme was unwillingly subdued.
Arriving as a pair they�d divided over sightlines and then continued to fuss, in whispers, about the volume. During the question-and-answer period, a tiny notebook, paper, and pen were passed back and forth across my sternum as a dispute flared over whom should call the other tomorrow and when.
I require more tranquillity
The question of why modernist authors such as Kafka and Proust and Faulkner wrote difficult books seems to me at least as much a matter of how they imagined readers as how they pictured time. In my experience, writing becomes difficult�in that sense�when readers have become a matter of private faith and practical indifference,
leavened occasionally by paranoia.
Why, I might have asked instead, was I being overwhelmed and stifled by memories of my worst days as a student of modernist literature? It was summer break after my freshman year in college, and I still owed an English paper which circumstances and emotions I don�t remember now had kept me from actually writing, although I�d shared my notes. These I studied for hours, stretched out and twisting on a blanket in the grass of our parching lawn. I couldn�t understand most of what I�d written. The topic involved Virginia Woolf�s Between the Acts, which I no longer understood either. Yet I could see that I�d had three or four beautiful and possibly unusual ideas about it�ideas which now appeared like alien or interstellar artifacts left behind in the appalling collision between my mind and this novel.
I remember the torpor, I remember being matter embedded with something I hadn�t the strength to remove.
Somehow by July I managed to write the paper; I�d write many more papers at college, usually on time. I�d excel. It always felt lucky. Behind each page I wrote were beetle holes, snake trails, ants, maple seed noses.
Nature I knew would engulf me.
Of course I remember you, he replied. (In parting I�d approached and asked a question after all.) I could not afford to buy his book; I passed the table and the New York night engulfed me. It occurs to me I ought to write a letter containing the congratulations I forgot to say, along with questions, once I buy and read the book of course. I wonder whether I will. Writing letters like that isn�t something I do.
This is what I do.
Consolation Site: From before