Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall

In recent weeks I have been to late nineteenth century Brazil and nineteen thirties Russia. Today I felt like coming home to Virginia Woolf in first world war England—less England than her inner life as it settles into words. Ten pages of the story/essay The Mark on the Wall were enough to release me on this rare—this summer—wet afternoon.

I have never been drawn to meditation but I like contemplation and the vagaries of idle thought, especially in a familiar place. Virginia Woolf in her chair with her writing board and her cigarette after tea, notices a mark on the wall and that mark leads her hither and yon.

How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it...

So does she—swarm, lift, carry and leave her mark on the wall, on the page. She is mannered and idle by today's standards. She is not going anywhere that she knows about in advance.

Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse.

She wants, she writes, to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. So this is home, and home is the place you can think from, sink from, into fluid intermingled non-facts. We need more of those.

Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one's though as a fish slices the water with his fin ...

From the mark on the wall she moves into trees—

first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding sap of the storm; then the slow delicious ooze of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.

Reading is like a series of baths, salt, sweet and aromatic.

Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.