This one is not about food

As I was flying home from Portland today, I continued to read Virginia Woolf's Moments of Being (specifically, "A Sketch of the Past"), begun a few days ago and then literally lost amidst my covers until I made the bed at 4:30 this morning. As I came upon a passage I began to say the words aloud in my head, a second's flash before reading them: "But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and most emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." It has probably been twenty years since I read that book, but it was as if the words and their very rhythm were still inside of me. This single beautiful sentence comes from a longer passage about patterns and connections between things:

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool [of non-being] is hidden a pattern; that we -- I mean all human beings -- are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.

A little of a late bloomer, I found Woolf in my twenties, and I became enormously devoted to her. When I read her work (and some of that by E.M. Forster: "connect, connect"), I had a feeling of both familiarity and discovery. Was she voicing ideas that I had inside of me as well? Or was she saying something new that I could believe? The will to find connections, to see patterns amongst people in the world (if not, as she does, in the natural world as well) defined my sense of my own place in the world. And these ideas drove my beliefs and, I think, my actions in my twenties quite explicitly and then implicitly over the next eight or ten years. In these beliefs I see my dedication to my friends as well as my union work in grad school and my teaching then and since. But something also broke for me along the way -- especially over the last five years (and most especially the last year in particular). For one, I think I became driven by notions of loss. For another, I think the make-up of my cohort has radically changed so that the connections I made with many of my friends became ancillary to their families or other primary relationships. And as I have not had a family myself, I am a bit adrift, unmoored. In fact, I've implicitly and explicitly cut a whole host of ties out of some mixture of guilt and longing and desperate incompleteness -- this tenacious sensation of missing-something. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

But why did I cut ties with Woolf, or at least sequester her to my twenties? A part of me thinks that has to do with the narrowness of an academic career these days. What, for instance, might she say to film? A part of me worries that I didn't take her seriously enough to imagine her work as philosophy -- cultural or aesthetic -- beyond A Room of One's Own (which itself seemed at some point too simple, even though it has so formed much of my feminist beliefs). Did I eschew her for writers more obviously commenting on culture -- Freud, Walter Benjamin et al. -- when, in fact, she shares so much in common with them?

I want to remedy this -- hence the reading of Moments of Being now and, late this summer, listening to To the Lighthouse. Besides the fact that I am teaching To the Lighthouse in a course on "Cinema and Everyday Life" this spring, in which I am determined to challenge myself and my students to find connections (whether philosophical, aesthetic, or structural) between her novel and the films we're looking at, I am also determined to return to these ideas that so formed me for over half my life. I no longer want to worry that such notions are "romantic" (exactly what I was accused of some years ago when I attempted to revive HD and Dorothy Richardson, Woolf's contemporaries after all, at a feminist film conference). Is it not possible to live in a world in which "we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself"? That's the world I want to inhabit.

(I mustn't do it alone.)