PSA the waves

[felinejumper]

I just finished The Waves (V. Woolf) and cried my way through the entire last section. I am, as usual, struck dumb by her, and thus have no more articulate commentary at this time. I really loved this section, though, and the return of hope and light and beauty after a moment when the soul is erased. I just. I cannot.

How then does light return to the world after the eclipse of the sun? Miraculously. Frailly. In thin stripes. It hangs like a glass cage. It is a hoop to be fractured by a tiny jar. There is a spark there. Next moment a flush of dun. Then a vapour as if earth were breathing in and out, once, twice, for the first time. Then under the dullness someone walks with a green light. Then off twists a white wraith. The woods throb blue and green, and gradually the fields drink in red, gold, brown. Suddenly a river snatches a blue light. The earth absorbs colour like a sponge slowly drinking water. It puts on weight; rounds itself; hangs pendent; settles and swings beneath our feet.

'So the landscape returned to me; so I saw the fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me, but now with this difference; I saw but was not seen. I walked unshadowed; I came unheralded. From me had dropped the old cloak, the old response; the hollowed hand that beats back sounds. Thin as a ghost, leaving no trace where I trod, perceiving merely, I walked alone in a new world, never trodden; brushing new flowers, unable to speak save in a child's words of one syllable; without shelter from phrases--I who have made so many; unattended, I who have always gone with my kind; solitary, I who have always had someone to share the empty grate, or the cupboard with its hanging loop of gold.

Comments

[felinejumper]

I remember then, the second summer, asking myself if I would remember that as the summer of The Waves and I do, and I do not know what it will be like to go through it again.

That's really, really real. I am still consuming new-to-me Woolf and thus haven't re-read anything besides Room, but she is so clearly strengthened by re-reading that it is very much a question of: do I want my whole being dredged up from the sea and shaken loose this week? Hmm.

!¡! Petal boats !¡! I loved, oh, so much of all of it (clearly), but the foundering boats and the caverns and Susan's ship alone was not quite heartbreaking and not quite delightful, but something in that arena of words.