thisnewday

I'm now a hundred and fifty pages into Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and almost feel like I'm cruisin.' I do have to stop, now and then, to go back over a passage that I haven't gotten on the first pass because, you know, Woolf's writing is pretty dense and I don't want to miss anything.

By dense I mean that every word, every sentence, every freakin' punctuation mark, lol, has significance, is loaded with meaning. And yet, every so often, she'll throw out a one-liner that's absolutely hilarious.

It's been quite an experience, so far, often challenging but invariably rewarding when the challenge is well and seriously taken. Like I said, Woolf's writing is dense but it's dense with meaning and purpose and an amazing poetry so intricately made of the sights and textures and sounds of the life that's all around us but mostly taken for granted.

So the challenge, really, is to experience life as Woolf and her characters do, the fulness of it, the beauty and the pain, the ecstasy and sorrow of it, that Woolf herself experienced from beginning to end.

All of which makes me feel that it's little wonder that she lived and died the way that she did, constantly challenging herself to live and work with such intensity that she finally came to that moment when she knew that she simply couldn't do it any longer.

I'm not there yet, thankfully, because I have six more of her books sitting on my bookcase, as yet unread.

And I don't want my daughter to find them there, like that, a sort of final extravagance that didn't yield the returns that would've hopefully been expected...

LPK
Dreamwidth
9.23.2017