On Me and Virginia's Style.

Reading Virginia Woolf can be quite challenging. I'm currently working through an anthology of her short stories, only they're mostly not stories at all, but observations and flights of imagination.

She had the kind of mind which, it seems obvious to assume, never stopped observing, and she observed every little detail of people, places, atmospheres, social situations, and whatever else which I can't be bothered to think of. Nothing, it seemed, missed her gaze which decanted into a mental world in which every nuance that could be caught on the radar of her five senses was dissected and described in minute, often lyrical detail. (No wonder she got depressed, poor woman.)

The difficulty comes from the fact that she tells it all in rapid, staccato fashion, which first leaves you a little breathless and then increasingly confused as you try to hold the pieces together into something resembling a narrative. At least, that's the effect it has on me. Virginia's perception of a narrative is not what most of regard as a narrative: a string of connected facts leading logically from one step to another to form a mental journey.

I have to admit at this stage that part of the problem lies with my habits. Living alone and having little contact with people and the outside world apart from observing the landscape and the animals, my life has become organised into a series of routines. (I suppose it's because they provide structure in an unstructured, personal existence.) And my routines are such that reading is naturally done at night. That can be a problem because at this time of year my house is cold at night, since I decline to switch on expensive electric heating until at least October. Being cold can make you tired; and being tired can make you colder. It's a vicious circle which works against the appreciation of complex wordsmithing, which is why tonight I considered giving up the attempt to make sense of Virginia's 'short stories.'

But is that reasonable? Virginia Woolf was clearly highly intelligent, blessed with a keen observational faculty, and possessed of a complex imagination. No doubt it's why she is considered a leading pioneer in the development of stream of consciousness writing. My paltry routines surely provide a poor excuse to give up on a writer of much substance. It's interesting, too, that I had little problem when I read her novel To the Lighthouse a few years ago;

And so I think I'll put the book aside until the storage heaters go on in October and the office is warmer. And perhaps the near daily hassles which life has been throwing at me for the past few months will also have eased. (Hassle is something else which makes me tired.)