Last week - or was it over the weekend? time loses shape - I re-read Mrs. Dalloway over the course of a day. Fitting, given that the action of the novel also takes place over a single day. I hadn't quite remembered that, nor had I thought, for a very long time, about the concept of "unity" in the Aristotelian sense, which was brought back to me by the otherwise boring preface.
I know I read Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse back in high school for some project for Mrs. Juda, and clearly I had been tasked with searching out various literary devices in the text, because both books are underlined and bracketed throughout with blue pen (I can even picture the kind of pen, the clear plastic Bic with the blue caps!) It annoys me less that I did the underlining than that none of the lines are straight, haha. I underlined "The leaden circles dissolved in the air," a phrase that's repeated a dozen or so times as time moves onward in the narrative. Occasionally I threw in a marginal notation, things like "stream of consciousness" scrawled, again unevenly, on page 13 of Mrs. Dalloway, but my favorite so far is the "!!!" on page 32 of To the Lighthouse as Mrs. Ramsey goes from being furious about a remark of her husband's about how her son's planned excursion won't happen due to weather ("so horrible an outrage of human decency...)" to, after his non-apology, sighing "She was not good enough to tie his shoe strings, she felt." Ditto, past self, wtf.
I'm pretty sure that I re-read Mrs. Dalloway at least once since then, but I couldn't find mention of it here in the "archive." What I found myself wishing for now, after I'd finished it, was that there was someone to discuss it with, like you'd get in a really good college class! I wished there was someone to point out to me things that I'd missed or make connections that I'd never think of, someone to debate it with. There are so many incredible characterizations, so many precise pinpointings of some element of human nature, so many phrasings that have stayed with me. "The leaden circles dissolved in the air" is one of them. "Holmes is on you. Human nature is on you" is another.
I remember being kind of bewildered by how emotional Woolf's characters are, or rather how changeable their emotional states seem to be, as they careen from joy to despair, from delight to resentment, in the space of mere lines (see above, both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey in that case) and then pick up and just carry on like none of that emotional maelstrom ever happened. I have the feeling I rolled my eyes a lot when I first read this, and I found myself getting impatient at times on this reading as well. And yet, I have to admit that it probably is in some ways a good characterization of how our minds work, constantly flitting from idea to reaction to sudden thought to perhaps intrusive thought, unless we're really keeping our focus on something.
One of the reviews I looked at online mentioned it as being one of those books you come back to over time, as you age, to see how you approach it differently. I know found myself empathizing with Rezia when I first read it because of what I underlined, like this: "And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. "Septimus has been working too hard" -- that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought." I had underlined another, earlier line of Rezia's about her isolation amid her troubles: "But failure one conceals." I understand that on a such a deeper level now, as the wife of someone who has struggled with such deep depression. The notion that there are really some things about your marriage that can't be communicated to anyone else, even in the midst of suffering...that really hit home.
I also teased Sean that I recognized myself in Clarissa's opposition of her own nature and passion for "noticing things" to Peter Walsh: "But Peter--however beautiful the day might be, and the trees and the grass, and the little girl in pink--Peter never saw a thing of all that. He would put on his spectacles, if she told him to; he would look. It was the state of the world that interested him; Wagner, Pope's poetry, people's characters eternally, and the defects of her own soul." That's us! I take pleasure in noticing things for their own sake; today, for example, I spent a few minutes keeping very still in the backyard so I could watch the activities of an eager young robin, who ultimately fled the attentions of another silver-gray bird I don't know the name of. Sean will look at things like that to humor me, but he's not interested in them on their own.
Today I started re-reading To the Lighthouse, which I'm not sure I've re-read since high school. I recall that I didn't like it very much on the first round. Woolf's characters aren't really ever meant to be likable, but this crew is less likable than those in Mrs. Dalloway (cf, Mrs. Ramsey's weird idolization of her husband, a not-too-successful philosophy professor). I like the editions that I have of both books, and they match, which is why I think To the Lighthouse, in particular, has managed to survive moves and purges and even remained in a place of relative honor on the hallway bookcase, rather than relegated to the basement.
"For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst..." We'll see how this re-read goes. If nothing else, the book's title gave me the line that I still say to myself every time I turn onto the beach stretch at the park: "to the lighthouse!"
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