i'm a very very complex person

Marilynne Robinson wrote, "The best privilege fiction can afford [is] the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls." She wasn't writing about To the Lighthouse, but she could have been; I can think of no better phrase to describe what Virginia Woolf achieves in this novel.

It took me almost half the book to appreciate To the Lighthouse. I could see from the start that the prose is very beautiful, but I needed to let myself sink into the book a bit, to slow my expectations to its pace, before I could really be moved by it. There is no plot to speak of, just a series of moments observed with precision and expanded until they contain whole worlds. The characters are ordinary people (a family and their guests at a summer home in the Hebrides) and they do ordinary things: knit, read to children, walk on the beach, paint. The things they think and the feelings they have towards one another--annoyance, love, protectiveness, jealousy, gratitude, sympathy--are ordinary too, but Woolf captures all of these ordinary thoughts and feelings with such perfect subtlety that somehow they become keys to unlocking all of the great mysteries of life. I'm not sure when I've ever read a book that managed to be about such small and such large things at the same time.

Perhaps my favorite part of the book was the strange, short, middle section, which describes the passing of ten years during which the summer house stands empty between visits. The section borders on the abstract, but the compression of such a long time into just a few pages makes for an intensity that's hard to describe. The images from that section may be what stays with me longest from this book.

But Woolf is also brilliant at evoking that feeling of suspension, of isolation, of strangeness that accompanies intense emotion. Nothing makes us more aware of being alone inside our own heads than feeling something powerful and unshared, but in To the Lighthouse it's an exquisite sort of isolation, a strangeness you can luxuriate in.

So at long last I have finally loved Woolf. She can go alongside of E.M. Forster, Graham Greene, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Dillard, Margaret Atwood and all the others on the list of writers of whom I need to read more.

From Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson:

I don't know how many times people have asked me what death is like, sometimes when they were only an hour or two from finding out for themselves. Even when I was a very young man, people as old as I am now would ask me, hold on to my hands and look into my eyes with their old milky eyes, as if they knew I knew and they were going to make me tell them. I used to say it was like going home. We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I'd walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not. Do you remember this house? I think you must, a little. I grew up in parsonages. I've lived in this one most of my life, and I've visited a good many others, because my father's friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn't too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It's a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn't feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do.

Ah, what a beautifully written book! This paragraph, right near the beginning, is so simple and so lovely; it tells us so much about this unnamed preacher: he is a quiet and a serious and a plain man, a man who has spent much time alone, and to whom the habits of loneliness still cling, despite the wife and young son he acquired late in life and loves dearly. This paragraph tells us all this, but it does so lightly--Robinson feels no need for emphasis. She is like her 76-year-old protagonist: contemplative, patient, and full of a deep faith. His faith is in God, hers in the strength of her narrative voice. I've only read fifty pages of the book, but thus far it appears that faith is not misplaced.