Connection

I'm reading The Waves today and am overcome by Woolf's cutting sense of isolation. Her writing pulsates with the desire for connection, but it's the very thing she denies again and again. Reading Woolf is like walking on glass. I only read her on my bravest days, or when I already feel alone and she becomes a strange opiate.

At first reading The Waves is like sitting in a pretentious coffee lounge, full of MFA students being "different" and smoking, until the tweed-wearing professor walks in, coughs meaningfully, and sits in the center, leather chair. It's dramatic, it's acting; it's Woolf stretching for greatness. It's nauseating.

Then half-way through, it's clear. Suddenly the cacophony of voices melts away, and it's just one voice painfully talking to itself:

‘Had I been born,’ said Bernard, ‘not knowing that one word follows another I might have been, who knows, perhaps anything. As it is, finding sequences everywhere, I cannot bear the pressure of solitude. When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Everything in a human life is "finding sequences." Our desire for relationship makes us constantly search for the meaning between things, for the connections, for those links that spell out the purpose of our existence. And sometimes it's just the desire to touch something and say, "here it is; I've got it!" All the while, you know it's slipping away faster than you can clutch it. Woolf insists on this gap, this loss, ultimately this silence of the self because no one will ever really understand.

The two great women writers in my reading are polar opposites. My beloved Eliot gives me faith in human relations, while Virginia breaks my heart.

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91w/section16.html
The picture is my own.