The Virginia Obsession.

I wish I could get out of this daily need to say something new about Virginia Woolf's writing, but the problem is this:

It took me quite some time to get used to her. Virginia Woolf writes differently than any other of the notable writers I've read, so much so that it's a bit like learning to comprehend a different dialect of your native language. It takes a while for the fog to slowly dissipate, but when the dialect crystalizes into intelligible speech, the effect is captivating. At least to me it is.

It's her mind, you see. It's so vast that it seems almost as if the world simply isn't big enough to accommodate it. The world of bishops and barristers, builders and bus drivers, Bentleys and Bugattis, festering hovels and fine houses, farmers' fields and flash floods (where am I supposed to stop?) is inadequate for a massively perceptive intellect which spots every nuance in the world of an urbane woman and leaves you with the feeling that there's plenty more but the story had to end somewhere. And her endings, when she finally releases the tether, are unbearably perfect. As someone who once thought himself a passable writer, I'm truly envious. I've enjoyed and appreciated the skill of plenty of writers, but I've never envied one before.

I'm even tempted to wonder whether she wasn't human at all, but a member of some superior species spending a mere fifty years of life observing reality at the base level and describing it to those capable of understanding. And just in case I'm giving a false impression here, let me say that she is often dismissive of base reality, but never arrogant. In fact, arrogance seems to be one of the states of mind she most derided.

There might be more to come.