I regret that I'm going to allow myself to become irritatingly repetitive by returning yet again to my current idee fixe: the personality of Virginia Woolf as evidenced by her writing. I crave pardon for that, but I wish I could persuade every reader of this blog (and I suspect there are a few) to read her short story The Introduction. I can't, of course, but let me begin at the beginning.
Some Buddhist traditions offer a simple account of the nature of humankind. They say we humans are a mixture of the angel and the monkey. Some err on one side and some the other, to varying degrees of course. I agree with it wholeheartedly, and when I express my dissatisfaction with the human condition I'm frequently told: 'You have to take the good with the bad. See one and ignore the other.' I find it a shallow viewpoint and my reply is always the same: 'If someone laced your cocktail with a spoonful of engine oil, could you taste the liquor and ignore the oil?'
This is the essence of The Introduction, expressed and explained through the meeting of Lily Everit and Mr Brinsley. She wishes to engage with him until she sees him callously pull the wings off a fly. He becomes the oil in the cocktail and her faith in the greatness of human endeavour falls in an instant.
She is writing my nature for me, but more passionately, more painfully, more skillfully, and more completely. I found her writing hard to negotiate initially, but persevered because I felt I should. Now I respect and adore the woman. I feel at the moment that she and I might be identical twins because most of what she writes echoes my own nature.
Maybe one day I will encounter something which questions that adoration. If so, I'll deal with it when I get there.
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