ig 🏳️‍🌈Mar 25

in light of recent Woolfposting i wanted a palate cleanse. so enjoy this masterclass of description from To The Lighthouse, wherein the story of the protagonists is told in brief asides as our focus remains fixed on their decaying summerhouse by the sea.

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101h.html#ch201

'What power could now prevent the fertility, the insensibility of nature? ... The place was gone to rack and ruin. Only the Lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw. Nothing now withstood them; nothing said no to them. Let the wind blow; let the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build in the drawing-room, and the thistle thrust aside the tiles, and the butterfly sun itself on the faded chintz of the arm-chairs. Let the broken glass and the china lie out on the lawn and be tangled over with grass and wild berries.'

#VirginiaWoolf #bookstodon #reading #AmReading

Show threadig 🏳️‍🌈
this is a book that is kind of infamously hard to understand. somewhere along the way we decided that this was a book's fault instead of a reader's skill issue. but the rewards of this book are commensurate with its difficulty. sometimes the sense of mastery you feel at the end of a difficult climb enriches the experience in a way you can't get with easy, flat terrain. in other words, sometimes difficulty is legitimate. not everything has to cater to convenience, short attention spans, and social media virality potential.
Mar 25 at 5:09amWeb