Diário de leitura - Londres, 2003
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| In a diary entry for 14 October 1922, Virginia Woolf commented that her work in progress would be 'a study of insanity and suicide: the world seen by the sane & insane side by side - something like that'. - (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996), 454-5. |
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| VIRGINIA WOOLF was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London |
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| "But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the slow-swimming ducks." |
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| "I love walking in London" |
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| "She stood for a moment, looking at the omnibuses in Picadilly." |
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| "She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything (...) She always had a feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day." |
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| "But what was she dreamimg as she looked into Hatchard's shop window? What was she trying to recover?" |
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| "What was she trying to recover? What image of the white dawn in the country, as she read in the book spread open: Fear no more the heat o'the sun, Nor the furious winter's rages.* . . This late age of the world's existence had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing." *Whilliam Shakespeare |
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| "She remembered once throwing a shilling into the Serpentine. But everybody remembered; (...) did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? But that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived..." |
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| "There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. (...) I am alone; I am alone! she cried, by the fountain in Regent's Park..." |
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| "The sound of Big Ben striking the half-hour struck out between them with extraordinary vigour, as if a young man, strong, indifferent, inconsiderate, were swinging dumb-bells this way and that." |
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| "As a cloud crosses the sun, silence falls on London; and falls on the mind. Effort ceases. Time flaps on the mast. There we stop; there we stand. Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame. Where there was nothing. Peter Walsh said to himself; feeling hallowed out, utterly empty within. Clarissa refused me, he thought." |
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| "There was an emptiness about the heart of life; an attic room." |
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| "And just because nobody yet knew he was in London, except Clarissa, the earth, after the voyage, still seemed an island to him, the strangeness of standing alone, alive, unknown, at half-past eleven in Trafalgar Square overcame him. What is it? Where am I? And why, after all, does one do it?" |
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| "'No! No! he cried. She is not dead! I am not old, he cried,' and marched up vigorous, unending, his future." |
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| "'I can’t keep up with them,' Peter Walsh thought, as they marched up Whitehall, and sure enough, on they marched, past him, past everyone, in their steady way, as if one will worked legs and arms uniformly, and life, with its varieties, its iridescences, had been laid under a pavement of monuments and wreaths and drugged into a stiff yet staring corpse by discipline. One had to respect it; one might laugh; but one had to respect it, he thought. There they go, thought Peter Walsh, pausing at the edge of the pavement; and all the exalted statues, Nelson, Gordon, Havelock, the black, the spectacular images of great soldiers stood looking ahead of them, as if they too had made the same renunciation…" |
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| "He had escaped! was utterly free – as happens in the downfall of habit when the mind, like an unguarded flame, bows and bends and seems about to blow from its holding. I haven’t felt so young for years! thought Peter, escaping (only of course for an hour or so) from being precisely what he was, and feeling like a child who runs out of doors, and sees, as he runs, his old nurse waving at the wrong window." |
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"(...) It was turning into a man! He could not watch it happen!
It was horrible, terrible to see a dog become a man! (...) Heaven was divinely merciful, infinitely benignant. It spared him, pardoned his weakness. But what was the scientific explanation (for one must be scientific above all things)? Why could he see through bodies, see into the future, when dogs will become men? *(for the first time I was forced to post a photo which wasn't taken by me - this one is perfect for the extract) |
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perhaps a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women." |
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themselves to some scene, to some room, to some past he had been dreaming of. It became clearer; the scene, the room, the past he had been dreaming of." |
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"The supreme secret must be told to the Cabinet; first, that trees
are alive; next, there is no crime; next, love, universal love, he muttered, gasping, trembling, painfully drawing out these profound truths which needed, so deep were they, so difficult, an immense effort to speak out, but the world was entirely changed by them for ever." |
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| "Beauty is everywhere." |
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| "As for Buckingham Palace (like a prima donna facing the audience all in white) you can’t deny it a certain dignity, he considered, not despise what does, after all, stand to millions of people (a little crowd was waiting at the gate to see the King drive out) for a symbol, absurd though it is; a child with a box of bricks could have done better, he thought…" |
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| "Suddenly he said, 'Now we will kill ourselves,' when they were standing by the river, and he looked at it with a look which she had seen in his eyes when a train went by, or an omnibus – a look as if something fascinated him; and she felt he was going from her and she caught him by the arm. But going home he was perfectly quiet – perfectly reasonable. He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said." |
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| "So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how does one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, - by sucking a gas-pipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know." |
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| "(…) – all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now." |
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| "The the habitation of God. In the midst of the traffic, there was the habitation of God." |
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| "Doggedly she set off with her parcel to that other sanctuary, the Abbey, where, raising her hands in a tent before her face, she sat beside those driven into shelter too; the variously assorted worshippers, now divested of social rank, almost of sex, as they raised their hands before their faces;" |
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| "For he would say it in so many words, when he came into the room. Because it is a thousand pities never to say what one feels, he thought, crossing the |
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| "He had only to open his eyes; but a weight was on them; a fear. He strained; he pushed; he looked; he saw Regent’s Park before him. (…) We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say." |
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| "Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent’s Park, was enough. Too much indeed." |
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| "…'It is the flesh, it is the flesh,' she muttered (it being her habit to talk aloud), trying to subdue this turbulent and painful feeling as she walked down prayed to God. She could not help being ugly; she could not afford to buy pretty clothes." |
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| "Communication is health; communication is happiness. Communication, he muttered." |
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| "Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty pure and simple – |
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| "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. " |
