BOOKS & CULTURE // No Man Is An Island
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Hogarth Press, London, 1927
EXCERPT //The Isle of Skye, Scotland — A little boy, vacationing with his family at the same summer house they visit every year, would like to take a trip to the lighthouse. “If the weather is fine,” is always the qualifier from the boy’s doting mother, Mrs. Ramsey, when she tells him whether they will be able to go. He holds tightly to his dream as the life of the family plays out around him. Virginia Woolf’s novel sets up a yin-yang relationship between the boy’s parents: Mr. Ramsey, a pompous and perhaps now irrelevant philosopher—who had early success but cannot seem to finish a second book—is constantly trying to break reality down into parts in a rational, Western framework. While he pontificates on the beach, his less-educated spouse cares for the family’s daily material needs, as well as all those of her guests. But at night, finally alone over her knitting, the depth of her musings rivals his egocentric graspings, her natural observations more closely hewing to Buddhist or Taoist philosophy. “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.” But given that we are ephemeral beings, how should we think about our own self—does it even exist? Since we can’t control the weather, or the rest of the world, or our own mortality, should we let go of our desires? The waves continue to crash onto the shore. Time passes. The weather is fine. It is not fine. We are in the light, or the dark, or both at once as the lighthouse spins around the waves. //
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