As others have been talking so interestingly about knots .. it does seem like quite a tangled knot how Mr. R. came to be the way he is, particularly, perhaps, the parent he is .. love your Wordsworth reference. I will stay away from generalizations about his generation, Victorians, etc.. He is not all bad, though he is impossible. James too is doing some artistic thing in selecting and cutting images .. Lily B. is courageous. A good word. More than we can perhaps understand from our vantage point.
Mr. Ramsay ponders the vagueness of women’s minds but it never occurs to him that the vagueness comes from his own inability to articulate what is on his mind. It is all their fault for not being able to read his own mind. “Look! Look!” he cries but look where? At what?
“Life stand still here” seems like a fine intention for a morning meditation practice. Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Shape in the midst of chaos. And as I write these words, the croak of a roadrunner hunting for lizards in my back yard. Part Two of this book was rough sailing for me at this particular moment in my life, but I have reached calm waters again. Story stand still here.
Love and agree with everything Mona writes today about the beautiful and surprisingly hopeful (for me anyway) revelation on time: "Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark."
And in the next chapter, amid James' conflicted thoughts of his father, his sudden riff on time in the next chapter also adds to VW's idea of these accumulated "moments of being":
"He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them."
I found that passage gut-wrenching - the juxtaposition of how sharply we, the readers, remember that image (Mrs. Ramsay in the low chair, his father standing over them), having just read it a few days ago, and how vaguely James remembers it, having lived it eleven years ago. Any book that engages with time must also engage with memory, and oh how fleeting it can be.
"Life stand still here." But of course it is impossible for life to stand still. Only in death does life still. Only in a work of art (a novel, a painting) can life be stilled. "Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark." This is the revelation, then. To love the moment. It seems to me the kind of thought that comes to a person when in a depressed state, something to hold on to. "Little daily miracles," we tell ourselves, hoping they will be enough. Does the person who is not depressed have such thoughts?
"There was a flash of blue, he remembered, and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very angry." Again, Mrs. Ramsay knows all: she predicted that James would never forget the disappointment of not going to to the Lighthouse. Interestingly, though, although he is remembering that afternoon, he is also remembering his mother's acquiescence to his father. And that "flash of blue." I like how it echoes the flash of the knitting needles in that moment, but what else? A shadow created by the presence of his father? A glimpse of the sea that was then blocked by him? His father's eyes? Perhaps all of the above.
The flash of blue is so striking and sad, what remains from his very corporal (that toddlerhood living where a mother’s body and personhood is almost another limb for them, so connected to them, and the sun) experience of connection to his mother and her deep and full love for him.
"he [Mr. R] liked men to work like that, and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were drowned, out there in a storm. So James could tell, so Cam could tell (they looked at him, they looked at each other)..." James and Cam have learned to communicate in that silent way Mr. and Mrs. R communicated before her death, and also like Mrs. R, both have learned to tether their gaze to their father, note his narcissism, and simultaneously rage against it and allow themselves to be seduced by it.
This encapsulates what Cam is feeling as they sail to the lighthouse:
"He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and Cam thought, feeling proud of him without knowing quite why, had he been there he would have launched the lifeboat, he would have reached the wreck, Cam thought. He was so brave, he was so adventurous, Cam thought. But she remembered. There was the compact; to resist tyranny to the death. Their grievance weighed them down. They had been forced; they had been bidden. He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning, come, because he wished it, carrying these parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, and all the pleasure of the day was spoilt."
Hard to know the full welter of James's feeling, as we are mostly in Cam's POV and hear him through that medium.
"For his own pleasure in the memory of dead people" is key. They want to deny their father even this solace in grieving for their dead mother, as in some instinctual way, they blame him for that.
Note the artistry in the way the word pleasure appears twice. Pleasure in honoring dead people spoiling the pleasure of the day. What matters more? Pleasure in honoring the dead or honoring life, living for today?
I wonder if there are any painters in the group and if they can agree with the process as Lily experiences it in Ch 3? I can only compare it to my own experience of writing. The self doubt, and questioning of why I would do it, no one will see it, what's the point. And the awful emphasis on beginnings, on making the first mark (which is misguided, but hard to avoid). As well as echoes of past criticisms .. from men mostly ... the truth is, as VW knew, anything can be re-written, and anything can be painted over and begun again .. but you have to make a start somewhere. Did Jackson Pollack waver over his canvases? Did Hemingway hesitate?
Aside from making some beginning marks, Lily does not get much painting done in this chapter, as she is hijacked by memories that turn out to be good, mostly. Mrs. R. and even Charles T. are softened by time and absence.
In Ch. 4 Cam goes through much the same thing that Lily did with Mr. R., with the added twist (in the finger of the glove?) of being his daughter. What I love most about this chapter I think is the complicated understanding passing between the two siblings as they try to negotiate the tricky island of their father. It would be so easy for the siblings to compete and throw allegiances against one another and yet their pact to resist tyrrany seems as if it will hold. The last line of the chapter. "They have no suffering there." Is a heartbreaker.
So much about perspective in these two chapters - seeing the boat from the shore, seeing the house and shore from the boat. Seeing and not seeing them. A memory being like a work of art, which one sees through the lens of one's own life and experience. Lily, oh Lily with her paint brush struggling with that formidable ancient enemy (still the risk must be run; the mark made.) The internal life of the artist, struggling against exterior things, like other people's opinions and thoughts. The public gaze. Lily seems eternally poised between wanting to be alone and to make a world of her own perfect creation, and her yearning for an audience (which she mostly does without it seems) and always she returns to Mrs. Ramsay - again and again. Oh Lily.
I am an artist, a printmaker, intaglio etchings. I had a friend visiting once and looking at my work hung said, “what is the point of doing /making art” and she really didn’t see the value but those of us who are artists know it comes from within that it is to put in place a point in time to make “life stand still”. That section where Woolf explains the...”daily motives,illuminations...is so poignant and that she knows writing makes the “moment permanent”.
Even Cam and James trying so hard not to get caught up in the moment but when they did , “had a sense of escape and exaltation “ and with Mr Ramsey their father they experience different moment, different “life stand still” moments and when he sees his daughter struggling he finds a way to break the moment and ask about the puppy. Yet even though she found so much to love about her father she couldn’t relinquish the suffering he caused the children-his tyranny.
The pathos Woolf creates in these chapters is beyond remarkable
I’m not a painter, but many in the Bloomsbury group were visual artists of one kind or another, and I assume Woolf would have accurately portrayed the act of painting through her knowledge of their work
Yes, and her sister Vanessa was a marvelous painter. It seems that Lily B. makes no studies that we know of and her canvas before she starts to paint is a complete blank in every sense.. I was wondering about her preparation, her approach. And I was thinking about it in terms of writing, drafts etc..
He’s not only cantankerous, he’s surly, without grace, and, in his ill-treatment of all, just about without humanity. Not happy to have to spend so much time with Mr. Ramsay.
Something that's standing out for me but is also in concert with VW's mastery of movement: Nearing the end of Ch 2, Mr R with Lily's shoes: "Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it." And then in an echo of tying/untying knots, at the middle of the first paragraph of Ch 3: "...something she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination." And with her canvas and the sail of the ship, foreground, background, reverse angles between Ch 3 and Ch 4. Movement seems so critical to the building/culmination of a (or this) VW novel.
And there were more knots. “But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone; rubbed out; were past”. The part about something getting knotted up and staying in her mind was so resonant. Tangled, not easy to understand or to be sorted. Really fascinating.
I am just so in awe of what she’s doing here. This is my first reading of Woolf, beyond excerpts from her diaries and letters and reading novels about her (how I love Michael Cunningham’s The Hours) but, wow, I am now enamored. Lily Briscoe’s starting to paint, amidst battling the doubters and her self-doubt; the sibling pact and thoughts about each other; Cam’s love for her father and piercing truth that her brother will not feel this “this pressure and division of feeling, this extraordinary temptation.” Whoops have to go! My daughter just arrived from Brooklyn!!!
I was young when I first read this novel and now I am not. Now I have many ghosts and feel the persistence of loss (here, for Lily and Cam and James, 10 years of it, and there will be more) , the way it can suddenly rise up: "to want and not to have--to want and want--how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh Mrs. Ramsay, she called out silently." The dead, Lily thinks, can seem manageable--"Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely"-- then, suddenly, it is as if Mrs.Ramsay "put her hand out and wrung the heart." There is no safety. The experience of the hand teaching out to wring the heart is grief. It is not all that persists (there is the joy in the moment, the connection) but the novel is clear about the persistence.
Thank you for sharing this insight. Oyff, the last several years have been marked by a lot of loss for me and I have, thus, been living alongside grief. It is humanity-expanding to read and connect to Lily’s experience of it. There was so much to connect with in these chapters that I hadn’t really focused on this part.
It's so modern: Lily, the artist, wants to fix an image, but an unruly, domineering character gets too close for comfort. An analogue of Virginia the writer?
"There was something ... something she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, sliding down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind..."
Thank goodness for Lily Briscoe, who despite her sometimes paralyzing self-doubt, confronts her white and uncompromising canvas, persists in untying the knot, making of the moment something permanent. "Life stand still here." Indeed.
This phrase “life stand still here” makes me kind of twitchy that stand isn’t “stands”.
One other teeny thing - love how the Macalister boy is back. A lesser director might have zoomed in for a close-up and revealed that he only wore one sock!
As others have been talking so interestingly about knots .. it does seem like quite a tangled knot how Mr. R. came to be the way he is, particularly, perhaps, the parent he is .. love your Wordsworth reference. I will stay away from generalizations about his generation, Victorians, etc.. He is not all bad, though he is impossible. James too is doing some artistic thing in selecting and cutting images .. Lily B. is courageous. A good word. More than we can perhaps understand from our vantage point.
Mr. Ramsay ponders the vagueness of women’s minds but it never occurs to him that the vagueness comes from his own inability to articulate what is on his mind. It is all their fault for not being able to read his own mind. “Look! Look!” he cries but look where? At what?
“Life stand still here” seems like a fine intention for a morning meditation practice. Matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Shape in the midst of chaos. And as I write these words, the croak of a roadrunner hunting for lizards in my back yard. Part Two of this book was rough sailing for me at this particular moment in my life, but I have reached calm waters again. Story stand still here.
Love and agree with everything Mona writes today about the beautiful and surprisingly hopeful (for me anyway) revelation on time: "Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark."
And in the next chapter, amid James' conflicted thoughts of his father, his sudden riff on time in the next chapter also adds to VW's idea of these accumulated "moments of being":
"He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea, how a man had marched up and down and stopped dead, upright, over them."
I highlighted that same passage from chapter 4. That seems to be the novel right there, its unity of form and function.
I found that passage gut-wrenching - the juxtaposition of how sharply we, the readers, remember that image (Mrs. Ramsay in the low chair, his father standing over them), having just read it a few days ago, and how vaguely James remembers it, having lived it eleven years ago. Any book that engages with time must also engage with memory, and oh how fleeting it can be.
Thanks for highlighting this passage.
"Life stand still here." But of course it is impossible for life to stand still. Only in death does life still. Only in a work of art (a novel, a painting) can life be stilled. "Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark." This is the revelation, then. To love the moment. It seems to me the kind of thought that comes to a person when in a depressed state, something to hold on to. "Little daily miracles," we tell ourselves, hoping they will be enough. Does the person who is not depressed have such thoughts?
"There was a flash of blue, he remembered, and then somebody sitting with him laughed, surrendered, and he was very angry." Again, Mrs. Ramsay knows all: she predicted that James would never forget the disappointment of not going to to the Lighthouse. Interestingly, though, although he is remembering that afternoon, he is also remembering his mother's acquiescence to his father. And that "flash of blue." I like how it echoes the flash of the knitting needles in that moment, but what else? A shadow created by the presence of his father? A glimpse of the sea that was then blocked by him? His father's eyes? Perhaps all of the above.
The flash of blue is so striking and sad, what remains from his very corporal (that toddlerhood living where a mother’s body and personhood is almost another limb for them, so connected to them, and the sun) experience of connection to his mother and her deep and full love for him.
"he [Mr. R] liked men to work like that, and women to keep house, and sit beside sleeping children indoors, while men were drowned, out there in a storm. So James could tell, so Cam could tell (they looked at him, they looked at each other)..." James and Cam have learned to communicate in that silent way Mr. and Mrs. R communicated before her death, and also like Mrs. R, both have learned to tether their gaze to their father, note his narcissism, and simultaneously rage against it and allow themselves to be seduced by it.
This encapsulates what Cam is feeling as they sail to the lighthouse:
"He looked proudly where Macalister pointed; and Cam thought, feeling proud of him without knowing quite why, had he been there he would have launched the lifeboat, he would have reached the wreck, Cam thought. He was so brave, he was so adventurous, Cam thought. But she remembered. There was the compact; to resist tyranny to the death. Their grievance weighed them down. They had been forced; they had been bidden. He had borne them down once more with his gloom and his authority, making them do his bidding, on this fine morning, come, because he wished it, carrying these parcels, to the Lighthouse; take part in these rites he went through for his own pleasure in memory of dead people, which they hated, so that they lagged after him, and all the pleasure of the day was spoilt."
Hard to know the full welter of James's feeling, as we are mostly in Cam's POV and hear him through that medium.
"For his own pleasure in the memory of dead people" is key. They want to deny their father even this solace in grieving for their dead mother, as in some instinctual way, they blame him for that.
Note the artistry in the way the word pleasure appears twice. Pleasure in honoring dead people spoiling the pleasure of the day. What matters more? Pleasure in honoring the dead or honoring life, living for today?
I wonder if there are any painters in the group and if they can agree with the process as Lily experiences it in Ch 3? I can only compare it to my own experience of writing. The self doubt, and questioning of why I would do it, no one will see it, what's the point. And the awful emphasis on beginnings, on making the first mark (which is misguided, but hard to avoid). As well as echoes of past criticisms .. from men mostly ... the truth is, as VW knew, anything can be re-written, and anything can be painted over and begun again .. but you have to make a start somewhere. Did Jackson Pollack waver over his canvases? Did Hemingway hesitate?
Aside from making some beginning marks, Lily does not get much painting done in this chapter, as she is hijacked by memories that turn out to be good, mostly. Mrs. R. and even Charles T. are softened by time and absence.
In Ch. 4 Cam goes through much the same thing that Lily did with Mr. R., with the added twist (in the finger of the glove?) of being his daughter. What I love most about this chapter I think is the complicated understanding passing between the two siblings as they try to negotiate the tricky island of their father. It would be so easy for the siblings to compete and throw allegiances against one another and yet their pact to resist tyrrany seems as if it will hold. The last line of the chapter. "They have no suffering there." Is a heartbreaker.
Ha ha, sounds about right! I'm not totally convinced rolling around on a canvas is art, but ..
So much about perspective in these two chapters - seeing the boat from the shore, seeing the house and shore from the boat. Seeing and not seeing them. A memory being like a work of art, which one sees through the lens of one's own life and experience. Lily, oh Lily with her paint brush struggling with that formidable ancient enemy (still the risk must be run; the mark made.) The internal life of the artist, struggling against exterior things, like other people's opinions and thoughts. The public gaze. Lily seems eternally poised between wanting to be alone and to make a world of her own perfect creation, and her yearning for an audience (which she mostly does without it seems) and always she returns to Mrs. Ramsay - again and again. Oh Lily.
Oh Lily!
Sadie, I love this, thank you: "A memory being like a work of art, which one sees through the lens of one's own life and experience."
I am an artist, a printmaker, intaglio etchings. I had a friend visiting once and looking at my work hung said, “what is the point of doing /making art” and she really didn’t see the value but those of us who are artists know it comes from within that it is to put in place a point in time to make “life stand still”. That section where Woolf explains the...”daily motives,illuminations...is so poignant and that she knows writing makes the “moment permanent”.
Even Cam and James trying so hard not to get caught up in the moment but when they did , “had a sense of escape and exaltation “ and with Mr Ramsey their father they experience different moment, different “life stand still” moments and when he sees his daughter struggling he finds a way to break the moment and ask about the puppy. Yet even though she found so much to love about her father she couldn’t relinquish the suffering he caused the children-his tyranny.
The pathos Woolf creates in these chapters is beyond remarkable
I’m not a painter, but many in the Bloomsbury group were visual artists of one kind or another, and I assume Woolf would have accurately portrayed the act of painting through her knowledge of their work
Yes, and her sister Vanessa was a marvelous painter. It seems that Lily B. makes no studies that we know of and her canvas before she starts to paint is a complete blank in every sense.. I was wondering about her preparation, her approach. And I was thinking about it in terms of writing, drafts etc..
He’s not only cantankerous, he’s surly, without grace, and, in his ill-treatment of all, just about without humanity. Not happy to have to spend so much time with Mr. Ramsay.
You are not susceptible to his beauty? Or his boots? Or his bravery? Or ..
Something that's standing out for me but is also in concert with VW's mastery of movement: Nearing the end of Ch 2, Mr R with Lily's shoes: "Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it." And then in an echo of tying/untying knots, at the middle of the first paragraph of Ch 3: "...something she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked along the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in imagination." And with her canvas and the sail of the ship, foreground, background, reverse angles between Ch 3 and Ch 4. Movement seems so critical to the building/culmination of a (or this) VW novel.
And there were more knots. “But Cam could see nothing. She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone; rubbed out; were past”. The part about something getting knotted up and staying in her mind was so resonant. Tangled, not easy to understand or to be sorted. Really fascinating.
I am just so in awe of what she’s doing here. This is my first reading of Woolf, beyond excerpts from her diaries and letters and reading novels about her (how I love Michael Cunningham’s The Hours) but, wow, I am now enamored. Lily Briscoe’s starting to paint, amidst battling the doubters and her self-doubt; the sibling pact and thoughts about each other; Cam’s love for her father and piercing truth that her brother will not feel this “this pressure and division of feeling, this extraordinary temptation.” Whoops have to go! My daughter just arrived from Brooklyn!!!
Agree about it being so fascinating
I was young when I first read this novel and now I am not. Now I have many ghosts and feel the persistence of loss (here, for Lily and Cam and James, 10 years of it, and there will be more) , the way it can suddenly rise up: "to want and not to have--to want and want--how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again! Oh Mrs. Ramsay, she called out silently." The dead, Lily thinks, can seem manageable--"Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely"-- then, suddenly, it is as if Mrs.Ramsay "put her hand out and wrung the heart." There is no safety. The experience of the hand teaching out to wring the heart is grief. It is not all that persists (there is the joy in the moment, the connection) but the novel is clear about the persistence.
Thank you for sharing this insight. Oyff, the last several years have been marked by a lot of loss for me and I have, thus, been living alongside grief. It is humanity-expanding to read and connect to Lily’s experience of it. There was so much to connect with in these chapters that I hadn’t really focused on this part.
It's so modern: Lily, the artist, wants to fix an image, but an unruly, domineering character gets too close for comfort. An analogue of Virginia the writer?
"There was something ... something she remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, sliding down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind..."
Thank goodness for Lily Briscoe, who despite her sometimes paralyzing self-doubt, confronts her white and uncompromising canvas, persists in untying the knot, making of the moment something permanent. "Life stand still here." Indeed.
This phrase “life stand still here” makes me kind of twitchy that stand isn’t “stands”.
One other teeny thing - love how the Macalister boy is back. A lesser director might have zoomed in for a close-up and revealed that he only wore one sock!
But it's a command, not an action.
I do not understand people who go to art shows and then question the value of making art!
Must it have a value? Yes, it comes from within, like Sadie said, the interior life ..
I agree completely about the pathos.
There is a strong sense in these pages that she did try to make life, or time, stand still, to look at the past as 'objectively' as possible ..