This book is a collection of Virginia Woolf’s short essays and literary criticism, often written for periodicals, often about lesser-known writers and frivolous themes. The book contains one writer’s overlooked treasures. Thus, it is only fitting that I should find this book on the discard table of my university library, along with copies of books like MS Office 2002. It’s never too late to learn MS Office circa 2002, and it’s never too late to discover Virginia Woolf.
In sharp, sweeping prose that often dwells on the everyday, puts the forgotten and overlooked under a microscope, there is a soft whisper in every sentence: “Pay attention.”
Take this sentence from the short essay “A Woman College from Outside” – “The feathery white moon never let the sky grow dark, all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green, and dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows.”
Take this passage and make it your get-well card for a time when prose and life seem too terse. As you do, be sure to embrace the night, for night is “free pasture, a limitless field unmolded richness, one must tunnel into its darkness. One must hang it with jewels.” The jewels might be the words of an author, found on the discard table of a university library, or it may be a night that teases your own prose jewels into being.
An epiphany – a discarded book and a notepad – that is all I need to lead a life rich in letters. Why ask for more, when to ask would be to diminish this bounty?
In the essay, “English Prose,” Woolf asks, “for who reads prose?” (In the 21st century, for that matter, who reads books?) She compares prose writing to Wizardry, almost as a kind of dark art. It does seem to me, as I read Woolf, that perhaps I have been confining myself to a kind of dark ages of prose. In recent memory, other than James Baldwin, I can’t remember reading prose as delightful as this. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I believe, is an altogether different beast, translated as his works are from Spanish, the sentences are complexified too much by magical realist details and abundance.
Woolf’s prose in this book is different. Listen to how Woolf describes bad prose: “But then – what is it? Something bald and bare and glittering – something light and brittle – something which suggests that if this precious fruit were dropped it would shiver into particles of silvery dust like one of those balls that were plucked from the boughs of ancient Christmas trees, and slipped and fell.”
Good prose – at the very least ornamental prose – to describe bad prose. Oh, what diminished bounty have Twitter, Instagram, ToicTok, and other instant media left us with.
It’s June 16th, 2024. Though I am poor, I own a hardback and some paper. More importantly, I own my time on this sunny, windy day. On Ms. Woolf’s prose, I shall endeavor to sail yet further down this warm day’s possibilities. When Woolf gives criticisms, she writes, “Lightly then will I run over a few suggestions and leave them to wither or perhaps fall on fertile soil.” And so, will I suggest that when you live as I do – by the word – give thanks, read, write..and though ungainly for a writer: smile.
Ms. Woolf makes an interesting point – novelists rarely write good prose. Perhaps that is a good thing – as if writing were a zero-sum game, what is gained in the prose is lost in the scenes, characters, plot, dialogue.
In the essay, “Patmore’s criticism,” Woolf writes the review of her own book. “Books of collected essays are always the hardest to read…it is often only the binding that joins them (the essays) together…our foreboding that we shall be jerked from topic to topic and set down in the end with a litter of broken pieces is in this case quite unfounded.”
As I was reading this essay, for reasons unknown, my mind delved into the evils of ambitions: more certificates, property ownership. Wouldn’t these take me away from Ms. Woolf’s prose and the richness of the discard table on which I found it? Don’t I seek to be a ghost made of paper and dreams in this digital age?
Again, reading Woolf’s essay on Thoreau, I am struck by just how much I feel chased about by modern life and just how much there is to be gained by disciplined simplicity. A discarded book, some scrap paper, and a pen are all I need to create universes. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…” Thoreau, as quoted by Woolf. Disciplined patience sometimes helps me to get closer to my design.
Woolf Writes that “from nature he (Thoreau) had learnt both silence and stoicism.” What wonderful bounties to take in the world.
Today’s lesson: quiet and stoicism. I try to listen to the world. On cloudy days in Wakimisaki, I can enjoy coffee, yutori, and my own thoughts.
I wish all the world such rich bounty.
The Ghosts of Nagasaki: A Novel 