A Momentary Taste of Being

I wanted to preserve this random Quotation that showed up on the site because, while I may not necessarily agreed with all that it entails, I think it captures a sense of mystery perfectly.  Oh, and it is lovely, absolutely lovely. Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Reflecting on Woolf reflecting on The Waves .

An appreciation of "The Mark on the Wall"

From Sheila yesterday--the Death of Virginia Woolf

I thought I had posted this earlier in the week, but I can't seem to find evidence of it.  (I was reminded by seeing it at Nigel Beale's blog) Virginia Woolf pictures and voice:

Happening upon a comment elsewhere regarding the book noted above, a comment I heartily endorse and agree with, I also found this while sorting through my many books: from "Orlando" in The Mulberry Tree Elizabeth Bowen Virginia Woolf's Orlando was first published in London in October of 1928. I remember, the book was regarded with some mistrust by one generation--my own, at that time 'the younger'. We, in our twenties during the '20s, were not only the author's most zealous readers, but, in the matter of reputation, most jealous guardians. Her aesthetic became a faith; we were believers. We more than admired, we felt involved in each of her experimental, dazzling advances. Few of us (then) knew the still-conservative novels of her first period; a minority had informed itself of The Mark on the Wall and Kew Gardens , hand-printed and issued in 1919 by the original Hogarth Press. She broke full upon us, it would be correct to say, with Jacob's Ro...

Virginia Woolf was well known to have little patience with Ulysses .  Joyce Carol Oates, in her book The Faith of a Writer suggests that part of this may have been the jealousy of one genius admiring the aplomb and power of another.  Following is a quotation from Virginia Woolf's diary available from Fathom . "I have read 200 pages [of Ulysses ] so far," Virginia Woolf writes in her diary for 16 August 1922, and reports that she has been "amused, stimulated, charmed[,] interested ... to the end of the Cemetery scene." As "Hades" gives way to "Aeolus," however, and the novel of character and private sensibility yields to a farrago of styles, she is "puzzled, bored, irritated, & disillusioned"--by no grand master of language, in her characterization, but "by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples." No artifact of elite difficulty, Ulysses becomes for Woolf the "illiterate, underbred book ... of a self tau...