I’ve occasionally mentioned on this blog that I cannot live entirely in the ‘now’ for its own sake. My thoughts and moods are almost wholly dominated by future prospects, and my personal ‘now’ almost wholly coloured by them. So read what Virginia Woolf says about a six-year-old boy, a character in To the Lighthouse who is based, I believe, on her own little brother (and maybe, to some extent, on herself):
Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn of the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests…
I gather that Virginia Woolf is lauded by some for her creativity, while derided by others for her self-indulgence. I wonder whether I might come to understand her, and even sympathise with her troubles, by reading one of her books.
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