I am awake at eleven in the evening holding Woolf’s To the Lighthouse open in my left hand as I sit with my right leg crossed over my left, uncomfortable, still staring down at the pages mindlessly—what a strange book this is, I wonder. Words glide before my eyes and what is the point of it all? What is the book about? I do wonder.
What’s with Mr. Ramsay, who quotes Tennyson as often as he does, and why does Lily Briscoe admire Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage and paint never quite to her satisfaction?
I cannot imagine a more boring read in the evening, but they tell me what a wonderful book this is and how imaginatively each line fuses with the next. Yes, wonderful; wonder-filled; filled with wonder; and I wonder why To the Lighthouse is on every classic books list and why the Ramsays all have to go to the lighthouse and why they get to leave while I have to read about “weeds that had grown close to the glass” windows and how a feather might fall and weigh down the roof of the house, collapsing the world into oblivion.
I’m lost between the streams of consciousness and thoughts spewed forth like a tiny knot for me to untangle. I want none of that, want not to feel my mind dangling precariously above a pit of befuddlement. But I fall in still and every other word, every metaphor and indecipherable shift fatigues me.
How difficult it is to keep going. I put down the book and pull out my phone and spend the next hour lost in the screen and fall asleep in the end feeling no better.
And—imagine this!—to wake up in the morning with sunlight in the room, desperate to nudge my eyelids open:
The pages flip to where I left off, and fatigue still wearies me. The constant shifts from place to place, as waves carry my thoughts here and there, sans orientation or direction, just now. The decade the novel spans has left me adrift in time, disembodied to be transported into the streams of thought of each character—only to be found again; wisps of wonder still linger in my mind, but before I can ponder them for long a different wonder appears.
There are plenty of experiences that are dismal. But Woolf is no dismal writer. So I wonder why reading about the Ramsays and the lighthouse feels so dismally incomplete.
I’ve kept reading this whole time and the novel has rewarded me with the lucidity of “Part III: The Lighthouse”, but my satisfaction is empty with lost words that have slipped past me on previous pages in little wisps of wonder.
It may be best just to read the last words “I have had my vision” and end it there. Put a period. on it and end it now. Let the words and wonders be what they are and give my valediction to several hours of my life which have but become memories. The streams of consciousness within the lighthouse flow as rivers continuous, and they converge among themselves and merge with my own.
A confluence of characters, dreams, whispers, times, wonders, my life.
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