from my own room

I'm going to examine as well as memory and concentration will let me the books I've consumed in the last couple of months. Tonight we start with Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own."

So much for thinking it would be easy to get through this skinny classic. I bought it, as usual, at The Strand for $1, and got a little bonus inside: a postcard bearing the author's image. It made a great bookmark, and still holds the place where (dare I admit?) I cut the reading short with only two pages to go. Did it wear me out? Did it prove I'm not enough of a feminist? Pish-tosh. I loved this book. It made me wish I had nothing in the world to do any day but write. I marked a little black arrow on nearly every page, so I won't quote all my favorite parts. I read "To the Lighthouse" in high school, but I forgot how great a writer Woolf is. Obvious, of course, but much of what I marked was simply out of reverence for the phrasing. Her talent makes me want to write. To practice. Her words make me want to write. To have the time:

"... going at ten to an office and coming home comfortably at half-past four to write a little poetry."

If only women had more money, they might be able to live that dream, Woolf says.

She's also not without a sense of humor:

"You cannot, it seems, let children run about the streets. People who have seen them running wild in Russia say that the sight is not a pleasant one."

Or imaginative cynicism:

"I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society. All human beings were laid asleep--prone, horizontal, dumb."

She chases her question, "Why are women poor?" But it eludes her in research: "... the question far from being shepherded to its pen flies like a frightened flock hither and thither, helter-skelter, pursued by a whole pack of hounds." And she doesn't quite solve the problem, either. I noted in the margin that Woolf frequently builds suspense for a point, then interrupts herself before reaching a significant revelation in her search for the "essential oil of truth."

She does, though, decide that "it is fatal for any one who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly."

Woolf's thoughts cover what men think of women, how men write about women, whether women write about men, and how society will view women in 100 years (2029). I'd like to revisit this work periodically for inspiration as a writer. And I'd venture to say Ms. Woolf would be on the list of people, "dead or alive," that I'd invite to a dinner party.

"What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. Yes, one feels, I should never have thought that this could be so; I have never known people behaving like that. But you have convinced me that so it is, so it happens."

But ...

"Praise and blame alike mean nothing. ... So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say."

Amen.