The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: Virginia Woolf

  • The Long Sea

    Not hunter nor hunted be
    but swimmer in this long sea
    the fishes your community
    though of course fish eat 
    each to each but rarely
    one’s own the point
    eat what’s available
    then go a fish out of the sea
    not the long or short of it
    but lost in the long run of the sea
    pages uncut
    written while working
    in a customs house
    dabbler dabbled in dawns of coffee
    and commutes and cubbied desks
    no time for more than doodles
    while the prof makes a living
    off an ever changing starting line
    the long market
    to market to market
    with a self-published book
    now out of print on demand
    there being no press
    and came to fancy Penelope
    the late bloomer
    and Barbara an excellent one
    and the two Elizabeths
    and Henry
    and Patty and Ray
    but of any poems composed
    in an alcove suffice to say
    what a waste
    yet this, and this is why
    one longs for the long sea:

    “No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out – a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress – children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was why now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experiences seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless….There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting platform of stability” (54).

    From “To the Lighthouse” (1927) by Virginia Woolf, Penguin Books edition 2023.

  • A word of one’s own

    Comfortably ensconced in our reading lair, hidden behind the arras of the Dec. 8 New Yorker, perusing the cartoons, time passing easily, and find our Eric has been at work on his French, annotating the Mankoff cartoon caption “A la Recherche des Cheveux Perdus” (p. 68) with the translation “Remember Hair Lost.”

    What is past is lost, but still we recall – writing is a lure; reading, a way of walking.

    Menand, Jan. 5: “Feiffer’s strips are about borrowed ways of talking, about the lack of fit between people and words, about the way that clichés take over” (p. 43).

    Blake: “No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “Proverbs of Hell”).

    Nabokov: “…minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise” (Lectures on Literature, “Good Writers and Good Readers,” p. 2).

    In Nabokov’s teaching copies, his annotations include his own translations; in his copy of  “The Metamorphosis,” for example, he substitutes the Muirs’s “uneasy dreams” with “a troubled dream,” and “a gigantic insect” with “a monstrous insect” (p. 250). Monstrous means marvelous and strange, and Nabokov starts his students off with a different view of Gregor, beginning with Kafka’s first sentence.

    Woody Allen: “Honey, there’s a spider in your bathroom the size of a Buick” (Annie Hall).

    For Nabokov, reading meant rereading in excruciating detail, never straying from the text, bringing to exact light and color the watermarks of the text, like working a coloring book.

    As for the uneasy, or troubled, dreams, Kafka reveals in the second paragraph that “It was no dream.”

    But one’s own words? Where does one find them? Sometimes a word of one’s own seems no more possible than a room of one’s own. For some answers, we might turn again to E. B. White’s Elements of Style, where we are warned to “Write in a way that comes naturally”; “Avoid fancy words”; and “Avoid foreign languages” (Chapter V).

    As for using words of one’s own to find lost time, Nabokov says: “…to recreate the past something other than the operation of memory must happen: there must be a combination of a present sensation (especially taste, smell, touch, sound) with a recollection, a remembrance, of the sensuous past” (p. 249). It took Proust 1.5 million words to illustrate that we are “…not free…to choose memories from the past for scrutiny” (Nabokov, p. 248).

  • Virginia Woolf’s uncommon reader

    Virginia Woolf was not a common reader, not a common woman, not a common person at all. Yet we like her description of a common reader, defining as it does the utility player-fan, driven by “common sense,” and “uncorrupted by literary prejudices,” and so “differs from the critic and the scholar,” in that “he reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” Thus free from the confines of convention, he approaches reading with “affection, laughter, and argument,” and if he is “hasty, inaccurate, and superficial,” that is because he moves on “without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure.”

    Woolf was a common reader within her circle, her community, but her experience does not define a common reader nowadays.

    The discussion brings us now to the downside of reading, the “Martin Eden” experience, the Jack London experience, the blue-collar kid who discovers reading, books, adventures of the vicarious. But he will never feel comfortable in a Bloomsbury circle, made up, after all, of a non-working class. So he tries to drop back into the group waiting for waves at 42nd Street, for he has read, not too much, but too well, as Bloom says of Hamlet’s thinking. Of course, our common reader is no Hamlet, no T. S. Eliot, nor was meant to be, an attendant, perhaps, waiting, as Beckett said, which brings us, “commodius vicus,” to the reading crisis:

         Is there a crisis if new readers are reading not so much as so well?

         Is there a reading crisis among common readers? 

         But who, nowadays or ever, is or was this common reader?

    Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.