2 posts tagged “emotion”

Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway can, I confess, be tedious to read. Indeed, it was tedious. Sometimes, it felt like I imagine a hunter might feel like, sitting in a tree stand scrutinizing the forest for every movement for hours on end, wondering when a particular movement will turn out to not be simply a breeze in the trees but an actual deer. You look up to take aim and it is gone, a moment of meaning-rich opportunity in a landscape of triviality. Single moments of what one wishes all of life could be.

Throughout the novel, the brains of the characters are constantly chattering and murmuring like the never-ending sound of a brook running or like the chimes of a clock you hear so often you stop hearing . . . and every so often, the heart can be seen through it if the rest has not put you to sleep. A s Lady Rosseter says right at the end, “What does the brain matter, compared with the heart?"

“For this is the truth about our soul, [Peter] thought, our self, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves ...”

It is hard to think of a better way to describe what it feels like to read this novel. Flashes of pure heart are revealed in a sea of internal and external conversation that can hardly be distinguished from “noise”. “Nothing has really happened until it has been described” Virginia Wolf once said, but so much of what she describes seems so abominably unworthy of remembering (to me). People in the novel are grasping at the moments of their lives that gave them joy and regretting the rest – they simply pass time. Do I really need to know everything that everyone is thinking in this novel? When it barely matters to them? As Woolf wrote to painter Jacques Raverat, it is "precisely the task of the writer to go beyond the formal railway line of sentence and to show how people feel or think or dream . . . all over the place.'"

At the heart of this story lies two people who had once been in love (perhaps), reflecting years later, on what they meant to each other, why they had acted as they had in forsaking one another, and what they were to each other now. It seems evident that Clarissa thinks her greatest happiness would have been found in a life with her best friend Sally (who she thinks of when thinking back to her happiest memory) but as this cannot even be considered, she ruminates about her decision to marry Richard Dalloway instead of Peter Walsh. Clarissa explains her decision to herself in the following words:

“So she would still find herself arguing in St. James's Park, still making out that she had been right--and she had too--not to marry him.  For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him.  (Where was he this morning for instance?  Some committee, she never asked what.)  But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India!”

“She could see what she lacked.  It was not beauty; it was not mind.  It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together. . . . They had always this queer power of communicating without words.”

In their brief meeting, her conscious thoughts wander from reminders of why she could not have lived with Peter to the conviction that she had never been able to live without him:

“Feeling as she sat back extraordinarily at her ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day! It was all over for her.”

And though he speaks to her in the same meeting of his work, his travels, his marriage, his present affections for another woman, he can't escape what he has never been able to escape:

“Beneath, she was . . . purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman's gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.  She came into a room; she stood, as he had often seen her, in a doorway with lots of people round her.  But it was Clarissa one remembered. . . . Clarissa was pure-hearted; that was it.  Peter would think her sentimental.  So she was.  For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt.  Cleverness was silly.  One must say simply what one felt. . . . One could not be in love twice, he said.”

Niether of them  really escape the first original “something” that had been there from the start. Despite years of burying it in other things, in activity, in other people, in endless hours of reflections about life, about people, about the environment, the weather.

“After that, how unbelievable death was!--that it must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all; how, every instant . . .”

The novel ends with the following lines.

"I will come," said Peter, but he sat on for a moment.  What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself.  What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.

For there she was.”

The fact that Clarissa is probably gay (as was Virginia Woolf) would have made it all impossible though and for that reason, I find myself asking “Why read this novel” - so full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

Earlier today, I watched the movie The Hours (the original title of Virginia Woolf's novel). It is a story about three women in three different eras. They each find themselves “stuck”. They each loved by someone who deserves their love but who they cannot love completely and unreservedly. Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) has a husband who is devoted to her but she cannot reciprocate his devotion. He has permission to try but not to succeed. I felt for him. Laura Brown (played by Jullianne Moore) has a husband and child who adores her but she cannot reciprocate. He too has permission to try but not to succeed. Clarissa Vaughn (played by Meryl Streep) loves her best friend, Richard, but the two of them were apparently unable to navigate their attractions to people of their own respective genders and cannot be everything to each other as one suspects they would have wanted to.
 
It is a profoundly sad movie really. It is about the horrible dilemma of people who find themselves trapped loving those they cannot love entirely, being loved by those who they cannot respond in kind to. Commitments that can never work. It is about the pain of abandoning what you love more than anything else.

If the book and the movie can help people to navigate out of this swamp, more power to them.

Question for Comment: In Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Bottom tells Tatania that "reason and love keep little company together now-a-days". Is this still the case?

“Passion is sanity” says Mr. Emerson in E.M. Forster’s A Room With a View. I was reminded of that scene in Star Wars where the spirit of Obi Wan Kenobe tells Luke Skywalker to shut off his X Wing fighter’s instrumentation panel and “trust his feelings” to find the precise moment to launch the missile that will destroy the Death Star and Save the Resistance from annihilation. “I forbid you to consult the Baedeker. You should consult your feelings here” Lucy Honeychurch is advised in A Room With a View, and the advice Lucy is given throughout the novel is consistent with that simple injunction, though with the understanding that “Life is easy to chronicle, but bewildering to practice.”

Forster keeps returning to the use of the word “muddled” as he brings his main character, Lucy, through the stormy sea of late adolescence and early adulthood. She is sent to Italy with a chaperone and the clear instruction to find a perfect Victorian husband with whom to live a perfect Victorian life and yet she discovers that Italy and the people that she meets there muddle everything. Her feelings don’t follow the channels that her society has dug for her to run into. Everyone, it seems, has a different idea about how she gets muddled, but they all know that she is getting so. Here are just a few examples.

“It isn't possible to love and to part. You will ... wish that it was. You can transmute love, ignore it, muddle it, but you can never pull it out of you. I know by experience that the poets are right: love is eternal” (19.42).

“[…] let yourself go. You are inclined to get muddled, ... if I may judge from last night. Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them” (2.43).

“And she spoke so seriously that the risk became a certainty, and he, lifting his eyes, said: “You are leaving him? You are leaving the man you love?”
I—I had to.
“why, Miss Honeychurch, why?”
Terror came over her, and she lied again. She made the long, convincing speech that she had made to Mr. Beebe, and intended to make to the world when she announced that her engagement was no more. He heard her in silence, and then said: “My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me” — dreamily; she was not alarmed — “that you are in a muddle.
She shook her head.
“Take an old man's word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. lt is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror — on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle.”

What clearly needs to happen before Lucy Honeychurch starts making decisions and promises that affect other people is this. She needs to figure out, in the abstract, what weights she will place on the various influences that affect her decisions. Will her feelings weigh 50%, her familiy’s opinions weigh 30% and her reason weigh 20%? Or will she construct some other recipe more like 30-30-30? “This solitude oppressed her;” the character, Lucy observes. “She was accustomed to have her ... thoughts confirmed by others or, at all events, contradicted; it was too dreadful not to know whether she was thinking right or wrong.”

And there is the rub, Lucy. There is no weighting of influences that will provide you with a right answer every time. So in matters of the heart, where no retreat from the decision is possible, aim to have your head, your heart, and your family all at a 100% agreement. And have a good reason why not if that can’t be the case.

In the end, E.M. Forster speaks through Mr. Emerson (a slightly veiled allusion to Ralph Waldo Emerson who wrote the Bible of the transcendental self making decisions in his essay Self Reliance), the essential thing is to know that you love and are loved:

“When I think what life is, and how seldom love is answered by love; Marry him; it is one of the moments for which the world was made.”

Or as the book of Song of Solomon puts it “I am my beloved’s and he is mine” … It seems like that is the sort of love that even God cannot help but celebrate. And I guess He should weigh more than anyone.

Think, feel, pray, listen … do all these things. Just don’t pretend.

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter ... of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue […] Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before (17.54-5).

One must assume that on the way to truth there will be muddlement. We must bear with it long enough to be allowed to see. To be allowed to grow up. Which is really simply the act of coming to see. Like learning to wait before walking after getting dizzy.

“Lucy cried aloud: “It isn't true. It can't all be true. I want not to be muddled. I want to grow older quickly.”

In response to the advice “beware of muddle” I think I would say “was there ever a different way to finding the truth?” As Oscar Wilde says “Only the shallow know themselves.” Muddled? Welcome to class.

Question for comment: We all get muddled sometimes. Do you tend to remain so longer than most? Why?