Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Primacy of the Inner Life, per Virginia Woolf

For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of -- to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish.
--To the Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf, pp. 70-71

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