Interesting surmise -- maybe Lily is becoming less fully rounded and more a narrative device .. I don't see this as a reduction of "her" - she is after all, fictional too...
Here at the end, I’m grappling with Woolf’s title. Maybe the lighthouse embodies her method and message? Its three strokes of light, each falling on top of its predecessors, then beginning again, represents how she builds her narrative, and how she suggests we construct reality. Different points of view, at different times and different distances, apply layers of meaning. Mrs. Ramsey’s shawl can become a shield or a shroud, a token of affection or loss. Mr. Ramsey can be a beloved husband, a frail ego, an all-the-way-to-R philosopher, a sarcastic brute, a pathetic widower, a tyrant to his children . All of these in turn, as each perspective illuminates some, and not other, features. When the beam falls matters, and also its distance, as Lily suggests at the beginning of chapter 11.
Yes. And maybe .. it's situating yourself, or within yourself, the distance you need from any one object, or person .. sometimes things rush at you very close, like death, and it takes time for it to recede again .. find a proper distance .. since the Lighthouse is fixed, unmoving, in one sense, while we are not ...
I thought that as well. When the long-awaited Gilead came out, I was ecstatic. Until I wasn’t--though I know others loved it. I was so taken with Housekeeping, I couldn’t really look at her other work except through that lens.
In this last section, there are several echoes of Proust (Woolf read him obsessively while writing Mrs. Dalloway a few years earlier): the claim that "life was most vivid then," when you come back from a journey or are getting over being sick, before habit has crusted itself over experience again; the experience of seeing someone out the train window, rhyming with Marcel seeing and falling in love with the milkmaid he sees out the train window.
Maybe my favorite description of the effects of art in a book filled such descriptions: "There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays." One of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays: that's "To the Lighthouse" for me!
there are so many great passages about the nature of creating art, writing, and generally how piece information together in stories. I didn't realize Woolf read Proust obsessively. To the Lighthouse often seems like the next step in the evolution of the novel from Proust. (and mercifully shorter!)
The ending of this book was so satisfying to me, but I can’t adequately say why. Or maybe I just don’t want to overthink it right now. Only that it had for me the feeling of fitting the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle I’ve been laboring over.
Admitting here, publicly, that I only just finished it today, at lunch, on a bench in a park across from where I work, and I am not feeling satisfied with the ending/ending. The getting to the ending, yes, but not the very last bit. This may change. This was my first read of VW, and I enjoyed it immensely doing it alongside folks here and guided by Mona’s intros for each part. I’m super glad to have participated.
Thank YOU for your thoughts and dialogue on this. I went back and looked at it, piecing things together (rightly or wrongly), and now feel a sense of ah, yes, rightness at the ending.
For Cam, in her last bit on stage, she reveals connection to both her father and brother; w brother, it is based on real understanding; w father, she feels that he is watching over her and, from this feeling, she feels a sense of safety that, in the next graph, allows for her sense of adventure and imagination to be alive.
For James, he has gotten - at last! - approval from his father!! I think this is a transformative moment for him, and that he will no longer be searching for a nearby ax when his father pontificates or is tyrannical, or perhaps he still will but will follow it up w affection for his father.
For the both of them are left (by us, the reader) watching their father step onto the lighthouse’s little island: “What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask is anything and we will give it to you.”
Wow! The family lives! The warmth of the family still holds for those Mrs. Ramsey left behind.
Then, Lily Briscoe: She watches this diminished family unit land and, in her watchful caring eye has given the insufferable (yet who was lovingly suffered by Mrs. R) Mr. R, concern and caring.
And yet! She is pulled back to her canvas because her role is not to become Mrs. R Number Two! She looks at her art and vanquishes the previous lacerating doubts and unhelpful comments of Mr. T - it would hang in attics; it would be destroyed. But what did it matter? Contrast this w p. 75 in my edition (Harcourt Brace paperback, copyright 1955) Lily wanting to weep at her canvas.
Then - she is her own wise and sure counsel and she SEES and KNOWS what her painting lacks, adds this essential touch and knows that it is finished. This when back in pp. 78-79, Lily is at Mrs. R’s knees leaning her head against them (for real or dreaming) and she is yearning, ardently, for more knowledge and wisdom: “And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsey’s heart. How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were.”
I feel that they’re all going to be all right. I don’t know any details or anything like that, but I feel a sense of completion and happiness at the ending.
Thank you, so much, Alfred-Patrick, for nudging me to go back and look more closely. :)
I’d love to have a discussion of the end of the book, when they are walking across the railroad tracks ... it almost seems like they are becoming spirits
"But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather."
Love this line from Lily ("slopes of a hill running purple!"!) and I equate it with Vanessa Bell's paintings, including the cover for this book, her focus on shapes and lines. And it seems so fitting, then, that the final act of the book, and of Lily's painting, is the line drawn in the center.
Lily remembers Tansley. She deliberately attended a lecture he gave once, and saw that he had indeed achieved the kind of success he'd wanted. Lily acknowledges a redeeming quality and her own bias against him in one of my favorite passages in the novel that his an observation about human nature that I think is indubitably true and the passage turns out quite funny in a very modern way:
"He was educating his little sister, Mrs. Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one’s own. He did for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to help herself to Mrs. Ramsay’s sayings, to look at him through her eyes."
Mona, you write that "Mrs. Ramsay would continue to the death saying that tomorrow, it might be fine, she expected it would be fine… while what Mr. Ramsay said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth. If novels had arguments (and some do, though, not, I don’t really think, the best ones) To the Lighthouse would seem to argue that happiness is made possible by kindness, by love, not by reality."
I wonder if both truthfulness and hope can co-exist, however-- if these two characters' attitudes were combined: both knowing tomorrow will not be fine, but hoping the future beyond tomorrow might be fine? Or knowing it might not be fine but seeing some other place to find a reason for optimism or hope?
Also, you remind us that in the middle section of the book, "Mrs. Ramsay notes ... They had been happier than they ever would be again."
Does this reflection of Mrs. Ramsay's seems to be a bitter-sweet acknowledgement of reality versus her usual hopeful attitude?
I like to think truth and reality can be exercised (exorcised) through art. I feel I am drawn (literally) through the awful sense of loss from part two--literally drawn through it by the enduring framework of Lily’s painting. She never stops, she never abandons it until it is “finished.” Again the words of Jesus on the cross. Art as a substitute for religion? Hmmmm.
What a wonderful day to end this reading. On Mother’s Day. Have a happy one to all of you people who care for others. I look forward to the discussion in zoom tomorrow evening!
Another question: In ch 9, after Lily thinks about how Prue "drooped under those long silences between them," how Mrs. Ramsay promised Lily she would enjoy the same happiness she had, but how Prue had "enjoyed it for less than a year, however," the next paragraph begins: "She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily thought, ... scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and ... went too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn--that was how she would have painted it. .. They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to meet someone round the corner ..."
Who are the three? Mrs. Ramsay is one, of course. Who are the others? And what is this referring to?
Is she thinking of Mrs. Ramsay, Andrew, and Prue -- heading off to their deaths, Mrs. Ramsay first?
(I love that even here, wherever she is going (!), Mrs. Ramsay seems to be moving ahead with anticipation and not fear, anticipating someone will be ahead and looking forward perhaps to meeting them.)
“ . . .catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe—even that little island?” Cam can still be excited and optimistic, even after the loss of her mother at such a young age.
Silent communication: Throughout the novel, characters seem to be silently interacting -communicating, struggling against each other, without saying a word.
"They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind"
Are the characters really communicating? Or is this another example of the internal creative process of storytelling. Just to ourselves?
I loved Mona’s insight that the line in the center that completes Lily’s painting is a figure for the novel itself, with “Time Passes” as the line in the center.
I think it’s a super clever insight but I don’t feel it yet, as resonant for me. I so appreciated Mona’s observation that Lily’s focus all along was on composition. Did she also say on distance?
Thinking how Mrs. R also was occupied with composition, this person and that should be married (on the hilariously thin basis that they both were interested in science and liked flowers), the sorting of people and time segments in the day and tasks and calculating, I imagine, the enough ness of food and chairs. But was it that Mrs. R inhabited this life as someone present in the scene while Lily appreciated especially with some distance?
Interesting surmise -- maybe Lily is becoming less fully rounded and more a narrative device .. I don't see this as a reduction of "her" - she is after all, fictional too...
Here at the end, I’m grappling with Woolf’s title. Maybe the lighthouse embodies her method and message? Its three strokes of light, each falling on top of its predecessors, then beginning again, represents how she builds her narrative, and how she suggests we construct reality. Different points of view, at different times and different distances, apply layers of meaning. Mrs. Ramsey’s shawl can become a shield or a shroud, a token of affection or loss. Mr. Ramsey can be a beloved husband, a frail ego, an all-the-way-to-R philosopher, a sarcastic brute, a pathetic widower, a tyrant to his children . All of these in turn, as each perspective illuminates some, and not other, features. When the beam falls matters, and also its distance, as Lily suggests at the beginning of chapter 11.
Yes. And maybe .. it's situating yourself, or within yourself, the distance you need from any one object, or person .. sometimes things rush at you very close, like death, and it takes time for it to recede again .. find a proper distance .. since the Lighthouse is fixed, unmoving, in one sense, while we are not ...
Also, couldn’t agree more about Robinson’s Housekeeping. Spectacular writing, as clean and clear as a mountain lake.
Haven't read Housekeeping in years, and just started it again today after seeing this discussion. A lovely follow-on, I think.
One of my favorite books!
Ditto!
A masterpiece!
It's perfection. Nothing she wrote subsequently compares. I'd love to read it again.
I thought that as well. When the long-awaited Gilead came out, I was ecstatic. Until I wasn’t--though I know others loved it. I was so taken with Housekeeping, I couldn’t really look at her other work except through that lens.
In this last section, there are several echoes of Proust (Woolf read him obsessively while writing Mrs. Dalloway a few years earlier): the claim that "life was most vivid then," when you come back from a journey or are getting over being sick, before habit has crusted itself over experience again; the experience of seeing someone out the train window, rhyming with Marcel seeing and falling in love with the milkmaid he sees out the train window.
Maybe my favorite description of the effects of art in a book filled such descriptions: "There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays." One of those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays: that's "To the Lighthouse" for me!
there are so many great passages about the nature of creating art, writing, and generally how piece information together in stories. I didn't realize Woolf read Proust obsessively. To the Lighthouse often seems like the next step in the evolution of the novel from Proust. (and mercifully shorter!)
Thanks for the reference to Proust ... one thing the pandemic did for me was allow me to read all of In Search of Lost Time.
I’m going to miss the characters VW created for us, those we loved, and also the others. Hang in there James. “Well done!”
A thought about Lily's "concluding" line - it might also be the lighthouse
The ending of this book was so satisfying to me, but I can’t adequately say why. Or maybe I just don’t want to overthink it right now. Only that it had for me the feeling of fitting the last piece into a jigsaw puzzle I’ve been laboring over.
Admitting here, publicly, that I only just finished it today, at lunch, on a bench in a park across from where I work, and I am not feeling satisfied with the ending/ending. The getting to the ending, yes, but not the very last bit. This may change. This was my first read of VW, and I enjoyed it immensely doing it alongside folks here and guided by Mona’s intros for each part. I’m super glad to have participated.
Thank YOU for your thoughts and dialogue on this. I went back and looked at it, piecing things together (rightly or wrongly), and now feel a sense of ah, yes, rightness at the ending.
For Cam, in her last bit on stage, she reveals connection to both her father and brother; w brother, it is based on real understanding; w father, she feels that he is watching over her and, from this feeling, she feels a sense of safety that, in the next graph, allows for her sense of adventure and imagination to be alive.
For James, he has gotten - at last! - approval from his father!! I think this is a transformative moment for him, and that he will no longer be searching for a nearby ax when his father pontificates or is tyrannical, or perhaps he still will but will follow it up w affection for his father.
For the both of them are left (by us, the reader) watching their father step onto the lighthouse’s little island: “What do you want? they both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, Ask is anything and we will give it to you.”
Wow! The family lives! The warmth of the family still holds for those Mrs. Ramsey left behind.
Then, Lily Briscoe: She watches this diminished family unit land and, in her watchful caring eye has given the insufferable (yet who was lovingly suffered by Mrs. R) Mr. R, concern and caring.
And yet! She is pulled back to her canvas because her role is not to become Mrs. R Number Two! She looks at her art and vanquishes the previous lacerating doubts and unhelpful comments of Mr. T - it would hang in attics; it would be destroyed. But what did it matter? Contrast this w p. 75 in my edition (Harcourt Brace paperback, copyright 1955) Lily wanting to weep at her canvas.
Then - she is her own wise and sure counsel and she SEES and KNOWS what her painting lacks, adds this essential touch and knows that it is finished. This when back in pp. 78-79, Lily is at Mrs. R’s knees leaning her head against them (for real or dreaming) and she is yearning, ardently, for more knowledge and wisdom: “And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsey’s heart. How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were.”
I feel that they’re all going to be all right. I don’t know any details or anything like that, but I feel a sense of completion and happiness at the ending.
Thank you, so much, Alfred-Patrick, for nudging me to go back and look more closely. :)
❤️
Lily paints ghosts. The people have passed away, but their shadows keep passing across our vision. As a writer, this resonates. We write ghosts.
It really did seem like the shade of Mrs. R was present in the end.
I wonder if anyone is interested in reading Robinson's Housekeeping together.
Would love an #APSTogether of Housekeeping if that can be arranged!
I’d love to have a discussion of the end of the book, when they are walking across the railroad tracks ... it almost seems like they are becoming spirits
"But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather."
Love this line from Lily ("slopes of a hill running purple!"!) and I equate it with Vanessa Bell's paintings, including the cover for this book, her focus on shapes and lines. And it seems so fitting, then, that the final act of the book, and of Lily's painting, is the line drawn in the center.
Lily remembers Tansley. She deliberately attended a lecture he gave once, and saw that he had indeed achieved the kind of success he'd wanted. Lily acknowledges a redeeming quality and her own bias against him in one of my favorite passages in the novel that his an observation about human nature that I think is indubitably true and the passage turns out quite funny in a very modern way:
"He was educating his little sister, Mrs. Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own idea of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains with her brush. Half one’s notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one’s own. He did for her instead of a whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to help herself to Mrs. Ramsay’s sayings, to look at him through her eyes."
Mona, you write that "Mrs. Ramsay would continue to the death saying that tomorrow, it might be fine, she expected it would be fine… while what Mr. Ramsay said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth. If novels had arguments (and some do, though, not, I don’t really think, the best ones) To the Lighthouse would seem to argue that happiness is made possible by kindness, by love, not by reality."
I wonder if both truthfulness and hope can co-exist, however-- if these two characters' attitudes were combined: both knowing tomorrow will not be fine, but hoping the future beyond tomorrow might be fine? Or knowing it might not be fine but seeing some other place to find a reason for optimism or hope?
Also, you remind us that in the middle section of the book, "Mrs. Ramsay notes ... They had been happier than they ever would be again."
Does this reflection of Mrs. Ramsay's seems to be a bitter-sweet acknowledgement of reality versus her usual hopeful attitude?
I like to think truth and reality can be exercised (exorcised) through art. I feel I am drawn (literally) through the awful sense of loss from part two--literally drawn through it by the enduring framework of Lily’s painting. She never stops, she never abandons it until it is “finished.” Again the words of Jesus on the cross. Art as a substitute for religion? Hmmmm.
What a wonderful day to end this reading. On Mother’s Day. Have a happy one to all of you people who care for others. I look forward to the discussion in zoom tomorrow evening!
Another question: In ch 9, after Lily thinks about how Prue "drooped under those long silences between them," how Mrs. Ramsay promised Lily she would enjoy the same happiness she had, but how Prue had "enjoyed it for less than a year, however," the next paragraph begins: "She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily thought, ... scattered and tumbled them on to the grass and ... went too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn--that was how she would have painted it. .. They went, the three of them together, Mrs. Ramsay walking rather fast in front, as if she expected to meet someone round the corner ..."
Who are the three? Mrs. Ramsay is one, of course. Who are the others? And what is this referring to?
Is she thinking of Mrs. Ramsay, Andrew, and Prue -- heading off to their deaths, Mrs. Ramsay first?
(I love that even here, wherever she is going (!), Mrs. Ramsay seems to be moving ahead with anticipation and not fear, anticipating someone will be ahead and looking forward perhaps to meeting them.)
“ . . .catching here and there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe—even that little island?” Cam can still be excited and optimistic, even after the loss of her mother at such a young age.
Silent communication: Throughout the novel, characters seem to be silently interacting -communicating, struggling against each other, without saying a word.
"They had not needed to speak. They had been thinking the same things and he had answered her without her asking him anything. He stood there as if he were spreading his hands over all the weakness and suffering of mankind"
Are the characters really communicating? Or is this another example of the internal creative process of storytelling. Just to ourselves?
I loved Mona’s insight that the line in the center that completes Lily’s painting is a figure for the novel itself, with “Time Passes” as the line in the center.
Same, I had never thought of that before, and now it seems so clear!
I think it’s a super clever insight but I don’t feel it yet, as resonant for me. I so appreciated Mona’s observation that Lily’s focus all along was on composition. Did she also say on distance?
Thinking how Mrs. R also was occupied with composition, this person and that should be married (on the hilariously thin basis that they both were interested in science and liked flowers), the sorting of people and time segments in the day and tasks and calculating, I imagine, the enough ness of food and chairs. But was it that Mrs. R inhabited this life as someone present in the scene while Lily appreciated especially with some distance?