Oh, poor Mr. Ramsay! There are only two paths for him: to discern the entire alphabet in a stroke of genius (which he is incapable of) or slowly slog his way through, one letter at a time (with constant support from his laughing, knitting wife). And all along, feeling himself to be a failure, an imposter. Surely there are opportunities along the way for small insights to let us skip instantly from A to C, or from Q to T? To feel happiness in a world of misery would seem to be something to treasure, not berate or judge so harshly.
I am struck by the fairy tale Mrs. Ramsay is reading to James—the Fisherman and His Wife. In the story an impoverished fisherman catches a magic flounder but lets it go after the fish says it is really a prince. When the fisherman’s wife learns her husband has let a magic fish go she pretty much orders him to go ask it to provide them a cottage to replace their hovel. And on and on. She isn’t happy till she’s pope. In contrast to the greediness of this wife Mrs. Ramsay is reluctant to trouble her man with mention of what it would cost to mend the greenhouse roof. It’s Mr. Ramsay who isn’t satisfied with Q but must get to R and on from there. Woolf seems to be making a point about the vanity of men here. Also, her favorite pejorative is “odious.”
Today’s passages brought to mind two of my favorite ancient writings:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
Ecclesiastes 1:2-4
Let others wear themselves out all for nothing, sweating blood, Battling their way along ambition’s narrow road.
Lucretius—On the Nature of the Things
Mr. Ramsay considers that the spectrum of genius may be analogized to the alphabet. And “[h]ow many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?”
He himself will at most reach R, and probably not even that.
He finds solace that even the achievements of Shakespeare are ephemeral. “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.” Yet it is small consolation. In contrast, “[h]is own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two.”
“[H]e wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of the man who stands eternally in the door of the lift.”
Yet isn’t he on the right track? Our contemporary humanism, our art, elevates the lift operator’s external and inner life, to equal importance to so-called great men.
Mr. Ramsay turns to his wife for solace, and she reassures him, “Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said.” But that is so paltry alongside Shakespeare. There must be another source of solace, completely different: “But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world.”
This leads to her best response. Like Epicurus and Lucretius, feel, live in the here and now. Be a humanist:
“He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing.”
Yet even her power to provide solace to the abraded male ego is vanity. Augustus Carmichael, the unhappy opium addict, shuffles by. She resents that his “odious” wife has, she believes, inclined him to resist her consolations. Yet she seems to admit to herself that the wife is right, Mrs. Ramsay is vain and desires to give consolation in return for admiration and praise.
“‘O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay . . . Mrs. Ramsay, of course!’ and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, and therefore when Mr. Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how selfseeking, at their best.”
I found the description of Mrs. Ramsay's efforts to provide her husband with the sympathy and support he needed somewhat .... I'm not sure. Disturbing, almost? The "fountain" imagery, her transforming herself or her energy "into force," definitely had a sexual connotation to me -- she seemed to "pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray... this fountain and spray of life." But she seems to labour with such effort to offer this: "braced herself ... seemed to raise herself with an effort" so (in a phrase told with the passive voice) "the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass." It seems uncomfortably impersonal and like she's subjecting herself to being used by him. Later, the metaphor shifts so he has been like a baby, nursing on/from her: "filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied."
Maybe I've over-reacting or not reading this properly, but "as the resonance died" and Mrs. Ramsay felt "not only exhausted in body ... but also ... some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin," which is that she feels "finer than her husband" and doesn't like feeling that way, I wasn't surprised. But again, my sense of what might be causing this "disagreeable sensation" seems to be much different than hers!
Great reading so many perspectives on today’s meditative chapters. In response to Susan Minot’s question: "Does Mr. Ramsay, like William Bankes, secretly suspect that if he hadn’t been blessed with this life, these children, he could have done the thing he might have done? Reach R? Even S, T?"
I see Mr. Ramsey somewhat as the Romantic's tortured “artist” (though he wishes (humorously, by VW I think, to prove “that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it.”). He idolizes the lone bird on the sea eaten shore who can share his brilliant with no one, because no one else is brilliant enough to understand him. And yet... this passage also strikes me with a relief for Mrs. Ramsey and their children, while looking at his wife and child through the window (The Window is the name of the first section of the book):
"Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?"
I love this, Mr. R. with his "great mind" turning toward domestic comforts and seeing his need for them as paying "homage to the beauty of the world". Is this a suggestion that the greater (though certainly puffed up) mind of Mr Ramsy sees beyond Mr Bankes’ insecure pride? And yet, Mr. Ramsey’s greatness is so frail. He suddenly turns in the next chapter, calls himself a failure, which refers to one of many things Mrs. R. must shield him from: his last book was not his best. Mr. Ramsey seems to be the lone figure on the shore, much like the lonely man in the lighthouse with his single, focused job to do, like the “the liftman in the Tube” who "is an eternal necessity,” unlike those with great minds and financial means.
So, I almost think Mr. Ramsey knows he can’t reach “R”; he resents Shakespeare who did; and perhaps this is why Mr. Ramsey got embroiled in the comforts of family life, an appreciated excuse for being “a failure” which he would feel regardless...?
Woolf reminds me Austen in her piercing critiques of her character's vanities--but Woolf seems less amused than Austen at people's pride. Woolf seems compassionate, but clinical in her diagnosis; Austen always seems to be chuckling.
I cannot tell if Mr. R indeed has the enduring qualities of a captain on a starving ship or a polar explorer on a failed expedition or if he just THINKS he does. If it's the latter, then that's funny, at least. His fear of being a failure definitely shows how desperately he wants and needs to "succeed." The narrator often confuses me--which character's mind am I in when Mr. Ramsey is being described in various heroic guises? Whose mind thinks, "But what was said?" Mrs. Ramsey's.
Mr. R doesn't seem to be self-aware of his own vanity, but Mrs. Ramsey, however, is quite cognizant that she likes to be needed by others (thus her irritation at Mr. Carmichael not being interested in her). Her self-awareness makes her superior to her husband to my mind (though, as said in today's opening comments, I still find Mr. R likable somehow).
I feel badly for saying Woolf isn't as funny as Austen--comparing Mr. R to a sea-lion flapping away is funny. Bravo to Mrs. R again!
There is political dimension to the book that I didn't pick up on in past readings. The people who are needed to make the Ramsey's (and others') lives possible are out of sight, and mostly out of mind, much like the characters' unconscious thoughts that are always in the background. This comes up first in Ms. Ramsey's charity toward the folks who worked the lighthouse (who are never seen) but made more explicit by this thought bubble by Mr. Ramseey.
"Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life"
An image that sticks with me in these chapters are Mrs. Ramsay's knitting needles: "Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow..." and in the next paragraph, "Flashing her needles, glancing around about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him..." The repetition of the clause at the start of each sentence seems to underline that the needles are the thing leading the charge. They're like swords or torches of light, and there's interesting parallel with heading into battle. They also almost seem like magic wands, as though she waves the needles (as she is knitting) and creates what Mr. Ramsay desires.
“Someone had blundered.” I always feel conflicted by my impulse to include references to literature. I feel inconsiderate, pompous, reckless—risking alienating the audience to satisfy my own inclinations. But then I see Woolf deftly weave together scenes using Tennyson, and I’m emboldened to go ahead and include a quote from Poe. And then one from Lewis Carroll. They’re so apt, after all. And it’s only a few artillery batteries, after all, and my horse is awfully quick and I’m so handy with this saber—
I love all the playing with sound—he shivered, he quivered. Later—he quivered, he shivered. Blunder, especially repeated here, is such a clunky, clumsy, perfect sounding word. Not a travesty, just a blunder. As mentioned, those flashing knitting needles. Mrs. R caving under the harshness of himself— a pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.
Later, going between name and fame and blame. Hard to dredge up sympathy for Mr. R.
His desire to snub the arts, considering them worthless decoration, that whole section is priceless.
I have been noting in the margins the shifts in POV as they occur.
She is a woman of the time, of course, and yet Mrs R’s devotion to propping up Jasper and smoothing the way for him amid the chaos of domestic life resonates with me as I suspect it does for other women. Those whispered “Don’t tell you father” conspiracies set one up to tiptoe around a brilliant man’s ego.
I loved seeing Mrs. R’s very human frustration with not immediately winning over Mr. Carmichael. After all, “she had not generally any difficulty in making people like her.” “she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty.”
The passage today with James and Mrs and Mr is overtly psychosexual and sent me scurrying to the internet to confirm that Freud broached the Oedipal complex in the Interpreation of Dreams around 1900, prior to Woolf writing this. Mrs R as a blooming flower, James stiff between her legs, and Mr R as the plunging scimitar. It's interesting also to wonder if Mr R would have achieved so much without children. Dickens and Tolstoy famously had lots, and relief on their wives to manage the house. Perhaps Mr R is more humane, recognizing Mrs R as the goddess she is? Still, what if she had been the artist, writer?
Both husband and wife have their vanities. I weary of Mr. Ramsey in these chapters, while Mrs. Ramsey's flash of humbling self-knowledge moves me deeply. She sees in her desire to give help her own vanity. "For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to give, that people might say of her, 'O Mrs. Ramsey, dear Mrs. Ramsey...Mrs. Ramsey, of course!' and need her and send for her and admire her." And Mr. Carmichael shrinking away makes her aware of this and the "flawed," "self-seeking" nature of all human relations. It's dark, but there is truth in it, even though I don't think self-seeking is the whole story of human relations by any means (nor do I think Mrs. R or Woolf believes this).
Oh, poor Mr. Ramsay! There are only two paths for him: to discern the entire alphabet in a stroke of genius (which he is incapable of) or slowly slog his way through, one letter at a time (with constant support from his laughing, knitting wife). And all along, feeling himself to be a failure, an imposter. Surely there are opportunities along the way for small insights to let us skip instantly from A to C, or from Q to T? To feel happiness in a world of misery would seem to be something to treasure, not berate or judge so harshly.
I am struck by the fairy tale Mrs. Ramsay is reading to James—the Fisherman and His Wife. In the story an impoverished fisherman catches a magic flounder but lets it go after the fish says it is really a prince. When the fisherman’s wife learns her husband has let a magic fish go she pretty much orders him to go ask it to provide them a cottage to replace their hovel. And on and on. She isn’t happy till she’s pope. In contrast to the greediness of this wife Mrs. Ramsay is reluctant to trouble her man with mention of what it would cost to mend the greenhouse roof. It’s Mr. Ramsay who isn’t satisfied with Q but must get to R and on from there. Woolf seems to be making a point about the vanity of men here. Also, her favorite pejorative is “odious.”
Vanity of Vanities!
Today’s passages brought to mind two of my favorite ancient writings:
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
Ecclesiastes 1:2-4
Let others wear themselves out all for nothing, sweating blood, Battling their way along ambition’s narrow road.
Lucretius—On the Nature of the Things
Mr. Ramsay considers that the spectrum of genius may be analogized to the alphabet. And “[h]ow many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all?”
He himself will at most reach R, and probably not even that.
He finds solace that even the achievements of Shakespeare are ephemeral. “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.” Yet it is small consolation. In contrast, “[h]is own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two.”
“[H]e wanted to disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescue of the man who stands eternally in the door of the lift.”
Yet isn’t he on the right track? Our contemporary humanism, our art, elevates the lift operator’s external and inner life, to equal importance to so-called great men.
Mr. Ramsay turns to his wife for solace, and she reassures him, “Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she said.” But that is so paltry alongside Shakespeare. There must be another source of solace, completely different: “But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the world.”
This leads to her best response. Like Epicurus and Lucretius, feel, live in the here and now. Be a humanist:
“He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing.”
Yet even her power to provide solace to the abraded male ego is vanity. Augustus Carmichael, the unhappy opium addict, shuffles by. She resents that his “odious” wife has, she believes, inclined him to resist her consolations. Yet she seems to admit to herself that the wife is right, Mrs. Ramsay is vain and desires to give consolation in return for admiration and praise.
“‘O Mrs. Ramsay! dear Mrs. Ramsay . . . Mrs. Ramsay, of course!’ and need her and send for her and admire her? Was it not secretly this that she wanted, and therefore when Mr. Carmichael shrank away from her, as he did at this moment, making off to some corner where he did acrostics endlessly, she did not feel merely snubbed back in her instinct, but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how selfseeking, at their best.”
I found the description of Mrs. Ramsay's efforts to provide her husband with the sympathy and support he needed somewhat .... I'm not sure. Disturbing, almost? The "fountain" imagery, her transforming herself or her energy "into force," definitely had a sexual connotation to me -- she seemed to "pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray... this fountain and spray of life." But she seems to labour with such effort to offer this: "braced herself ... seemed to raise herself with an effort" so (in a phrase told with the passive voice) "the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass." It seems uncomfortably impersonal and like she's subjecting herself to being used by him. Later, the metaphor shifts so he has been like a baby, nursing on/from her: "filled with her words, like a child who drops off satisfied."
Maybe I've over-reacting or not reading this properly, but "as the resonance died" and Mrs. Ramsay felt "not only exhausted in body ... but also ... some faintly disagreeable sensation with another origin," which is that she feels "finer than her husband" and doesn't like feeling that way, I wasn't surprised. But again, my sense of what might be causing this "disagreeable sensation" seems to be much different than hers!
Great reading so many perspectives on today’s meditative chapters. In response to Susan Minot’s question: "Does Mr. Ramsay, like William Bankes, secretly suspect that if he hadn’t been blessed with this life, these children, he could have done the thing he might have done? Reach R? Even S, T?"
I see Mr. Ramsey somewhat as the Romantic's tortured “artist” (though he wishes (humorously, by VW I think, to prove “that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life; they do not express it.”). He idolizes the lone bird on the sea eaten shore who can share his brilliant with no one, because no one else is brilliant enough to understand him. And yet... this passage also strikes me with a relief for Mrs. Ramsey and their children, while looking at his wife and child through the window (The Window is the name of the first section of the book):
"Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her—who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?"
I love this, Mr. R. with his "great mind" turning toward domestic comforts and seeing his need for them as paying "homage to the beauty of the world". Is this a suggestion that the greater (though certainly puffed up) mind of Mr Ramsy sees beyond Mr Bankes’ insecure pride? And yet, Mr. Ramsey’s greatness is so frail. He suddenly turns in the next chapter, calls himself a failure, which refers to one of many things Mrs. R. must shield him from: his last book was not his best. Mr. Ramsey seems to be the lone figure on the shore, much like the lonely man in the lighthouse with his single, focused job to do, like the “the liftman in the Tube” who "is an eternal necessity,” unlike those with great minds and financial means.
So, I almost think Mr. Ramsey knows he can’t reach “R”; he resents Shakespeare who did; and perhaps this is why Mr. Ramsey got embroiled in the comforts of family life, an appreciated excuse for being “a failure” which he would feel regardless...?
Woolf reminds me Austen in her piercing critiques of her character's vanities--but Woolf seems less amused than Austen at people's pride. Woolf seems compassionate, but clinical in her diagnosis; Austen always seems to be chuckling.
I cannot tell if Mr. R indeed has the enduring qualities of a captain on a starving ship or a polar explorer on a failed expedition or if he just THINKS he does. If it's the latter, then that's funny, at least. His fear of being a failure definitely shows how desperately he wants and needs to "succeed." The narrator often confuses me--which character's mind am I in when Mr. Ramsey is being described in various heroic guises? Whose mind thinks, "But what was said?" Mrs. Ramsey's.
Mr. R doesn't seem to be self-aware of his own vanity, but Mrs. Ramsey, however, is quite cognizant that she likes to be needed by others (thus her irritation at Mr. Carmichael not being interested in her). Her self-awareness makes her superior to her husband to my mind (though, as said in today's opening comments, I still find Mr. R likable somehow).
I feel badly for saying Woolf isn't as funny as Austen--comparing Mr. R to a sea-lion flapping away is funny. Bravo to Mrs. R again!
There is political dimension to the book that I didn't pick up on in past readings. The people who are needed to make the Ramsey's (and others') lives possible are out of sight, and mostly out of mind, much like the characters' unconscious thoughts that are always in the background. This comes up first in Ms. Ramsey's charity toward the folks who worked the lighthouse (who are never seen) but made more explicit by this thought bubble by Mr. Ramseey.
"Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class. The liftman in the Tube is an eternal necessity. The thought was distasteful to him. He tossed his head. To avoid it, he would find some way of snubbing the predominance of the arts. He would argue that the world exists for the average human being; that the arts are merely a decoration imposed on the top of human life"
An image that sticks with me in these chapters are Mrs. Ramsay's knitting needles: "Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and kitchen, set them all aglow..." and in the next paragraph, "Flashing her needles, glancing around about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him..." The repetition of the clause at the start of each sentence seems to underline that the needles are the thing leading the charge. They're like swords or torches of light, and there's interesting parallel with heading into battle. They also almost seem like magic wands, as though she waves the needles (as she is knitting) and creates what Mr. Ramsay desires.
“Someone had blundered.” I always feel conflicted by my impulse to include references to literature. I feel inconsiderate, pompous, reckless—risking alienating the audience to satisfy my own inclinations. But then I see Woolf deftly weave together scenes using Tennyson, and I’m emboldened to go ahead and include a quote from Poe. And then one from Lewis Carroll. They’re so apt, after all. And it’s only a few artillery batteries, after all, and my horse is awfully quick and I’m so handy with this saber—
I love all the playing with sound—he shivered, he quivered. Later—he quivered, he shivered. Blunder, especially repeated here, is such a clunky, clumsy, perfect sounding word. Not a travesty, just a blunder. As mentioned, those flashing knitting needles. Mrs. R caving under the harshness of himself— a pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.
Later, going between name and fame and blame. Hard to dredge up sympathy for Mr. R.
His desire to snub the arts, considering them worthless decoration, that whole section is priceless.
I have been noting in the margins the shifts in POV as they occur.
She is a woman of the time, of course, and yet Mrs R’s devotion to propping up Jasper and smoothing the way for him amid the chaos of domestic life resonates with me as I suspect it does for other women. Those whispered “Don’t tell you father” conspiracies set one up to tiptoe around a brilliant man’s ego.
I loved seeing Mrs. R’s very human frustration with not immediately winning over Mr. Carmichael. After all, “she had not generally any difficulty in making people like her.” “she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty.”
The effects of Empire and the unquenchable quest for more.... for life’s illusions lost...
‘’You raise your head and ask ‘Is this where it is? And say’ Oh my God am I here all alone?’
But something’s happening and you don’t know what it is... do you Mr. R?’’ :)
The passage today with James and Mrs and Mr is overtly psychosexual and sent me scurrying to the internet to confirm that Freud broached the Oedipal complex in the Interpreation of Dreams around 1900, prior to Woolf writing this. Mrs R as a blooming flower, James stiff between her legs, and Mr R as the plunging scimitar. It's interesting also to wonder if Mr R would have achieved so much without children. Dickens and Tolstoy famously had lots, and relief on their wives to manage the house. Perhaps Mr R is more humane, recognizing Mrs R as the goddess she is? Still, what if she had been the artist, writer?
Both husband and wife have their vanities. I weary of Mr. Ramsey in these chapters, while Mrs. Ramsey's flash of humbling self-knowledge moves me deeply. She sees in her desire to give help her own vanity. "For her own self-satisfaction was it that she wished so instinctively to give, that people might say of her, 'O Mrs. Ramsey, dear Mrs. Ramsey...Mrs. Ramsey, of course!' and need her and send for her and admire her." And Mr. Carmichael shrinking away makes her aware of this and the "flawed," "self-seeking" nature of all human relations. It's dark, but there is truth in it, even though I don't think self-seeking is the whole story of human relations by any means (nor do I think Mrs. R or Woolf believes this).
Hi