Mrs Dalloway

Oh, oh, oh. I love how perfectly heartbreaking and yet, what, celebratory this is? Every time I re-read it it is like looking at the world in a new way.

“A marvellous discovery indeed ‰ЫУ that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses‰ЫЄ heads, feathers on ladies‰ЫЄ, so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more.”

This is the only Virginia Woolf piece that I have read and not loathed entirely, which says something by itself. However, I still find myself almost entirely unmoved by Virginia Woolf and her rambling, ridiculously long sentences. She is lauded for her skill at crafting sentences and describing things and yet I think it's ridiculous that someone who insists on saying an entire paragraph's worth of thought without once using a period is considered brilliant for it rather than... well, ridiculous. It gets to the point sometimes in Woolf's writing where I am jolted entirely from her prose because the beginning of a sentence and the end of it are on separate pages and the original thought is lost among the rambling, forcing me to go back and reread.

I cannot stand that.

Again, I liked this better than all the other Woolf I've read, but I can't say I'm a fan. I would never have read this had it not been required for class and I have to say I resented the teacher a bit for assigning it after I finished trudging through the mess of it all.

This book was like the Log Ride
at Astroworld...once you climb
in, you can't stop. Virginia
Woolf seems to try to be as
honest and true as she can,
even when what she writes is
horribly painful.