The Ws of My Literary Life [Part 1]
I began reading A Room of One’s Own [Virginia Woolf] this morning on the Subway and picked it back up on the M57 after work. I have only recently begun to read the lengthy introductions that usually precede any ‘classic’ novel and was thoroughly enjoying the words written by Susan Gubar. I was keeping pace, nearly a page finished each time the bus driver announced a passing avenue, when the following passage stopped me:
we live in a world
which is wholly real, but very largely muffled up. <for some
reason almost entirely covered up.>
wh. is half covered up. & from wh. the cloak must be torn
Reality <Moreover> is a most curious thing, because it is never the
same for t.
(Forgive me for my clumsy use of language) is the thing that
leaps out on us in unexpectedly at some corner. It is the
strangest thing, because one can never foretell when it will
come – {why, for example, a paper drifting along a dirty
street is suddenly real & all the } & it is always different
for different people. Yet it is the quality that gives <alone has
power>
importance to give importance, & lastingness; <leap upon the
moment & endow it with immediacy> which is
all the stranger, considering that trifles sometimes seem
real, & what mountains mere sawdust. However
this may be, the writer is the expert in touch with
reality; <a> the lightning conductor whose gift it is to
attract the lasting, the real out of the great mountain of
that mass of a person whose has the astonishing
good fortune to live, more than other people, in the heart of
reality. So at least I assume from reading
the what are called masterpieces.
(From Woolf’s own edits of her essay Women & Fiction 169-70).
Initially, this passage passed quickly. As always, I gazed at each word and strung them into sentences before moving on to read Grubar’s commentary. Following the passage she writes, “The artist as ‘lightning conductor’ has the capacity to feel the shock of electricity and convey it without being consumed by it.”
How beautiful and how true. Artist + Journalist finally connected. Isn’t this the mission of any journalist: To witness the news [feel the shock of electricity] and then deliver [convey] it to the readers without altering it? I paused on this for a moment and made a mental note to write it down later in my book of quotes.
A few seconds passed before a nagging thought interrupted me: ‘What did I miss?’ As much as I enjoyed Grubar’s commentary, in no way did my thoughts on the passage match hers. I realized that I would have never made that deduction without her help. I went back to the text and tried dissect each word of Woolf’s dense language and find the source of her statement. Impossible.
Then, the painful realization that I don’t always read anymore. I skim constantly; it is a necessary skill for my hours spent at work on Digg or Twitter, but the antithesis of what I should be doing while reading Virginia Woolf, a woman who writes essays filled with words that can each hold enough significance to fill pages of Literary Journals.
And so, sitting on the M57, I took out my pen and underlined words in the passage and drew lines between sentences in an effort began to practice my ‘critical thinking skills.’ If one page of the introduction had me stumped, how was I going to make it through the rest of the text?
