Excerpts From The Waves

"I see a ring," said Bernard, "hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light."
"I see a slab of pale yellow," said Susan, "spreading away until it meets a purple stripe."
"I hear a sound," said Rhoda, "cheep, chirp; cheep, chirp; going up and down."
"I see a globe," said Neville, "hanging down in a drop against the enormous flanks of some hill."
"I see a crimson tassel," said Jinny, "twisted with golden threads."
"I hear something stamping," said Louis. "A great beast's foot is chained. It stamps, and stamps, and stamps."

This is the beginning (or almost the beginning) of Virginia Woolf's seventh novel, The Waves. Already, it is obvious that this novel is not only very different from her previous novels, but from all previous novels. It continues in this fashion through the entire book (aside from each section's italicized introduction, which details the sun's movements over the course of a single day), following the lives of these six people as they grow from childhood to old age. I cannot begin to describe how terrific and different this book is. I am not well enough read to be an authority--nor am I a book reviewer--but I will say it tops my list of favorites. Here are a few quotations which show how excellently Woolf captures the immense range of feelings and perspectives not only from childhood to old age but from introvert to extrovert and all the other unnameable contrasts of multifarious being.

"I cried as I ran, faster and faster. What moved the leaves? What moves my heart, my legs? I dashed in here, seeing you green as a bush, like a branch, very still, Louis, with your eyes fixed. 'Is he dead?' I thought, and kissed you, with my heart jumping under my pink frock like the leaves, which go on moving, though there is nothing to move them. Now I smell geraniums; I smell earth mould. I dance. I ripple. I am thrown over you like a net of light. I lie quivering flung over you."

"Now I will wrap my agony inside my pocket-handkerchief. It shall be screwed tight into a ball. I will go to the beech wood alone, before lessons. I will not sit at a table, doing sums. I will not sit next Jinny and next Louis. I will take my anguish and lay it upon the roots under the beech trees. I will examine it and take it between my fingers. They will not find me. I shall eat nuts and peer for eggs through the brambles and my hair will be matted and I shall sleep under hedges and drink water from ditches and die there."

"We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasure of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and the everlasting road."

"Oppose ourselves to this illimitable chaos," said Neville, "this formless imbecility. Making love to a nursemaid behind a tree, that soldier is more admirable than all the stars. Yet sometimes one trembling star comes in the clear sky and makes me think the world beautiful and we maggots deforming even the trees with our lust."

I only have two more of her novels left; then I will have read all of them. So far she has easily gotten better with every book--it has been fascinating to follow her development chronologically. If you have not read anything of hers and are interested in giving her a try, I'd recommend starting with any of her novels after the first two, as they are more conventional (though I love The Voyage Out) and do not have the innovative brilliance which grows throughout the rest.

The Problem With Having a Purpose

I once had someone tell me that I seemed like the kind of person that is good at anything he tries. It struck me as inexplicable because I've always viewed myself as a serial failure. Of all the things I've attempted, I have yet to reap a single success, often of my own volition. When I was in middle school I joined the wrestling team and I was terrible. I was short, skinny, pale, and I'd walk out on the mat and get pinned in the first round, right away. But I leapt up from the mat after the whistle blew because I didn't care—the other guys were good and they pinned me quickly and I didn't care. Then a strange thing happened—I got better. Through no real determination of my own I became the one that pinned the others, folded their bodies beneath me and shifted my weight until their shoulders were aligned against the mat and stood up and had my hand raised. My father told me, “Now you're a wrestler,” and then I quit the team. When people asked me why, I told them, “I'm going to write a novel.” I had forty thousand words accumulated of what was really an abomination of a Tolkein ripoff, and I needed the time to finish it. I never did—but I never stopped writing.

In high school, I did well on the Speech Team and then I quit. I was in innumerable plays until I quit drama too. I graduated in the bottom half of my class, got rejected by the only school to which I applied, then spent half a semester at a community college before quitting that. I've made films, played instruments, taken voice lessons, all eventually to quit. I tried so many things, but when I saw them as in the way of my writing or my freedom (which are really the same thing for me) then I quit them immediately. The truth is I'm not good at anything—I just approach all things with an ape's fumbling curiosity and for a while fall in love, only it's always a brief affair borne from the thrill of novelty and discovery—always, that is, except for writing: the only thing I am good at, and the only thing I've always loved. In someone's—I think it was Ebert's—review of the movie Drive, he said that Gosling's character is someone we don't see much of any more: someone who lives to do one thing and one thing only, and is very good at doing it. Well, my problem is with the latter part: while I long ago was dedicated to one purpose (I put this in the passive because, while I actively affirm it, my invincible inclination to write is beyond choice or question, thrust upon me in my infancy by circumstances I could not begin to quantify) I do not really know that I am good enough to ever produce anything worth remembering or, what is perhaps more to the point, anything of enough value to make me feel that I have done anything but fail.

I think I could make a great animator. I've got the skill-set, I enjoy it, and I'm enough of an autodidact to master the software, but it would require passion and dedication that I just don't have for anything but writing novels. It would require long, irregular hours, which are exactly what I went to school to escape. Therefore, since I cannot sacrifice writing for animation and I'm unlikely to make a living off my novels, I must find a third option that is something enjoyable enough that I won't hate life, intuitive enough that I won't have to dedicate my entire life to mastering, and stable enough to give me the day-to-day framework I need in order to fruitfully live and write. For me, I think that's probably web design and programming. Probably. I have done well with it so far, and find it easy and enjoyable enough to do every day. Still, it is somehow depressing to contemplate, not because of the work itself but because ingrained in it is the future, and I do not want a future of quiet, corporate, middle class mediocrity. Many people embrace such a future because it enables them to live well with their families, their true source of happiness, but mine is fiction, and in it the odds are so overwhelmingly against me, the future so uncertain, that it is an attempt to find light in an ocean of darkness, and I stand waist-deep looking into its depths, having followed a path paved with failure, and somewhere down there is that light, tiny, calling me.