Discover more from APS Together
Chapter 11
We’ve noticed, of course, by now that we’re still in the same day, the same late afternoon. All of “The Window” takes place in a matter of hours, the afternoon and evening of one day. Woolf achieves this continuity by her use of repeated phrases, to remind us that virtually no time has passed; the paragraph or pages we’ve just read are in someone’s head and they are still thinking of the same refrain, such as, in this chapter “children don’t forget, children don’t forget.”
Meanwhile her husband is chuckling over the thought of Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat, stuck in a bog.
“No happiness lasted; she knew that… She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded and the blue went out of the sea… and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!”
While Mr. Ramsay frets over his books, their lack of appeal to the “young men” and worrying over how long they’ll be read after his death, happiness matters to Mrs. Ramsay. Happiness today. In the present. Her investment in this day can seem—at moments—almost an intimation of death.
Chapter 12
The Ramsays are an idealized, golden family and their guests and children are characterized, in part, by how they respond to them. Their sparkle cannot be denied; royalty is evoked throughout; William Bankes sees the children in terms of the kings and queens of England, the older girls see their mother as a queen. “The Window,” Part 1 of the book, tinkers with the theme of generations. The Ramsay daughters don’t quite imagine their lives like their mother’s, centered around some man or other.
In Chapter 12, Mr. Ramsay worries about Andrew applying himself sufficiently to get a scholarship; Mrs. Ramsay sees Prue becoming a great beauty. We see the daily tensions of marriage.
We have the fourth reminder of Mrs. Ramsay’s worry that the repair of the greenhouse will cost fifty pounds, but though the reader has heard about it three times she hasn’t managed to say that out loud yet to her husband.
We understand more and more about the fragility of Mr. Ramsay’s professional ego.
He was about to say that Tansley (“the little atheist”) “was the only young man in England who admired his—when he choked it back.” Out of pride perhaps, or, as he tells himself “he would not bother her again about his books.”
“His arm was almost like a young man’s arm, Mrs. Ramsay thought, thin and hard, and she thought with delight how strong he still was, though he was over sixty…”
MR. RAMSAY IS OVER SIXTY!
And Mrs. Ramsay has grey hair.
Join us on May 15 for a virtual discussion of To the Lighthouse with Mona Simpson.
 | A guest post by
|
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Day 5
I love this passage so much. Sums up so much. It could be a standalone poem for the ages. Yes, I have a weakness for beautiful weirdness:
"She saw the light again. With some irony in her interrogation, for when one woke at all, one’s relations changed, she looked at the steady light, the pitiless, the remorseless, which was so much her, yet so little her, which had her at its beck and call (she woke in the night and saw it bent across their bed, stroking stroking the floor), but for all that she thought, watching it with fascination, hypnotised, as if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!"
My favorite passage thus far also appeared in today’s reading. The first couple pages of chapter 11. Mrs. Ramsay’s intense relief at the children going to bed, permitting her to let everyone fall away, being left with the “wedge of darkness” that is herself. The relief of solitude. One of those exquisite moments when a writer expresses perfectly something I have also felt, and I feel un-alone.