“It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece of eternity; as she had already felt about something different one before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures.”
-Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Rereading a book is an interesting undertaking. I am strongly of the opinion that if a spoiler ruins a story, then it is a bad story. But something must be said about the truth that foreknowledge of a story changes one’s perception of it. A story can only be experienced for the first time once, and every subsequent revisit is a different experience because not only are we affected by the last time we experienced the story, but also because we have ourselves changed and therefore will interpret it differently. I reread my favorite story (The Sun Also Rises) once a year, usually the first time I visit Vermont or the first time I go fly-fishing. Every time I find some new line to obsess over, marvel at the sections which do (or don’t) hit me more impactfully, and find comfort in the lines and scenes familiar for the differences in which I read them.
I suppose it is a rare thing to reread a story one has professed to disliking, which is why it is all the more surprising that I picked up a copy of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse on my last trip to Providence. This was one of those stories—the ones I was made to read in high school and did if only to pass an assignment. But I remember struggling with it at the time because of the writing style, stream of consciousness and I have a love-hate relationship, and because of the seeming nothingness of the plot. I am not even saying these are fair critiques, but they were the impressions I carried with me since high school of a book I struggled with, remembered little, and set aside with no attention of returning to.
I am not going to profess a great newfound passion for the writing of Virginia Wolf. But it was a fascinating reread not only for how little I remembered of the story but for how much my appreciation of the things it attempted has grown. Whether it has been a spurt of modern novels in recent years (looking at you, Sally Rooney) or a growing appreciation of the small things of life (hello, Mary Oliver and Wendy Cope) and the slower pace of life so often desired in these modern times, but To The Lighthouse this time read commiserative, understanding, and far too relatably pathetic.
It's that pace of life I want to focus on first, because so much of Woolf’s work revolves around the at once grinding and yet terribly inevitable passage of time (it’s even one of the book’s sections).
“Well, we must wait for the future to show,”… begins the section in question.
There are those memories we all carry fixed in certain points in time, things that feel immortal for our recollections of them. What Woolf does well is expose us to a seminal moment that is at once grand in the minds of those experiencing it and yet is, somewhat objectively, almost nothing through the pace of their lives. That a trip to the lighthouse should warrant examination over death in war or the failure of a marriage is a testament to the ways in which humans place emphasis on anything of meaning. So powerful the emotions of young James Ramsay, so desperate his mother’s desire to maintain peace, and so both misunderstanding and misunderstood is his father that this is the act that lingers, whose effects are felt through the course of their lives and the book. Woolf does this well, both as an evaluation of the moment in and of itself and for the repercussions it has on the fraught family dynamics of the Ramsays.
The complicated nature of human relationships and the wealth of misunderstandings within them is another area in which To The Lighthouse excels. One feels the pain of each character and their struggles not only with how they are viewed by others but also how they view themselves. That these factors are themselves often irreconcilable and a source of great discomfort for all involved only adds to that sense of modern realism embedded through the text. There are no unsympathetic characters, none that I can find, for the novel almost impassively comments on the trials and internal workings of each character in turn. (I am going to again make a Sally Rooney comparison, and hope it is a compliment to both authors). But there are those easier to sympathize with, to relate to, and with whom life experience is easier shared. That makes us players in this game as well, and does well to endear one to the novel itself.
As for the novel itself, I find a curious relation to its reason for existing and how it justifies itself through the character of Lily Briscoe, the character with whom I most related. But there the sympathy of artists, and that may be as much the journey to the lighthouse as anything else. The ways in which we as people seek to understand, immortalize, and find meaning in the hurried and snaillike pace of life is so often to turn to the arts—be it painting or writing or music. Through To The Lighthouse, Woolf manages to capture the minute moments of powerful emotion we all experience through all stages of our lives and present them for us in honest, introspective ways that make our own lot in life all the easier to understand. And it does this through art, by nature of existing, and in another sense, by being read. Experienced. Like life!
As I said, I won’t pretend that I am completely enamored with To The Lighthouse. But through this reread, I have come better to understand it and, perhaps, understand more the role of art in all our lives. I have myself written once that art is sympathy, and I think Woolf understood something of the same. I will think of the book more, and even more in my own moments of small powerful emotion that make the poetry of life so incredibly vivid.
The quiet nights sitting outside, looking at a light in the distance, and merely marveling at all that time passing by and what to do with it.