"The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a rain-drop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue, and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved an and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves."
'Kew Gardens' (1919), Virginia Woolf
There are few people as brilliant as Virginia Woolf for making us slow down and look at not just the things around us, but to look at our responses to them as well. Do things exist without our responses? If we don't name things then what are they? Virginia Woolf participates intensely in the desire of the influential Russian linguist Viktor Shklovsky that art of al sorts should be trying to "make the stone stony". That is, to make the qualities of things more intense, and more themselves. But things always belong to the observer, because who defines what a stone is? When is a stone a pebble, a rock, a bit of some particular element? When is a stone to be considered as a single unit and when is it to be considered as part of something else, a pile, a track, something that is broken etc etc. In her way, Virginia Woolf was exploring all these things and that is why just a short passage by her can be inexhaustible, and why she always rewards reading.
ReplyDelete