le fishbowl

I finished Mrs. Dalloway a little less than a month ago and it is now one of my favorite novels. The moment I finished it, I wanted to go back to the beginning and read it again (which is exactly what I'm going to do once I finish reading this).

The reason I love Mrs. Dalloway so much is Woolf's writing, which in this novel (the only one of hers I've read) feels to me like prose poetry, both because of the long, flowing sentences and because of Woof's genius for putting things that are intangible and unsaid into words....PERFECT words:

"Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing...his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on top of the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. He was not afraid."

"One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, color; the traffic thinned, motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences...I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry."

"For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself..."

"For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying - what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

'But I do not know,' said Peter Walsh, 'what I feel.'"

"The word 'time' split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without his making them, hard, white, imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; an immortal ode to Time."