To The Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

observe (he lifted his right foot and then his left) that she had never

  seen boots made quite that shape before. They were made of the finest

  leather in the world, also. Most leather was mere brown paper and

  cardboard. He looked complacently at his foot, still held in the air.

  They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity

  reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots.

  Her heart warmed to him. "Now let me see if you can tie a knot," he

  said. He poohpoohed her feeble system. He showed her his own

  invention. Once you tied it, it never came undone. Three times he

  knotted her shoe; three times he unknotted it.

  Why, at this completely inappropriate moment, when he was stooping over

  her shoe, should she be so tormented with sympathy for him that, as she

  stooped too, the blood rushed to her face, and, thinking of her

  callousness (she had called him a play-actor) she felt her eyes swell

  and tingle with tears? Thus occupied he seemed to her a figure of

  infinite pathos. He tied knots. He bought boots. There was no helping

  Mr Ramsay on the journey he was going. But now just as she wished to

  say something, could have said something, perhaps, here they were--Cam

  and James. They appeared on the terrace. They came, lagging, side by

  side, a serious, melancholy couple.

  But why was it like THAT that they came? She could not help feeling

  annoyed with them; they might have come more cheerfully; they might

  have given him what, now that they were off, she would not have the

  chance of giving him. For she felt a sudden emptiness; a frustration.

  Her feeling had come too late; there it was ready; but he no longer

  needed it. He had become a very distinguished, elderly man, who had no

  need of her whatsoever. She felt snubbed. He slung a knapsack round

  his shoulders. He shared out the parcels--there were a number of them,

  ill tied in brown paper. He sent Cam for a cloak. He had all the

  appearance of a leader making ready for an expedition. Then, wheeling

  about, he led the way with his firm military tread, in those wonderful

  boots, carrying brown paper parcels, down the path, his children

  following him. They looked, she thought, as if fate had devoted them

  to some stern enterprise, and they went to it, still young enough to be

  drawn acquiescent in their father's wake, obediently, but with a pallor

  in their eyes which made her feel that they suffered something beyond

  their years in silence. So they passed the edge of the lawn, and it

  seemed to Lily that she watched a procession go, drawn on by some

  stress of common feeling which made it, faltering and flagging as it

  was, a little company bound together and strangely impressive to her.

  Politely, but very distantly, Mr Ramsay raised his hand and saluted her

  as they passed.

  But what a face, she thought, immediately finding the sympathy which

  she had not been asked to give troubling her for expression. What had

  made it like that? Thinking, night after night, she supposed--about

  the reality of kitchen tables, she added, remembering the symbol which

  in her vagueness as to what Mr Ramsay did think about Andrew had given

  her. (He had been killed by the splinter of a shell instantly, she

  bethought her.) The kitchen table was something visionary, austere;

  something bare, hard, not ornamental. There was no colour to it; it

  was all edges and angles; it was uncompromisingly plain. But Mr Ramsay

  kept always his eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself to be

  distracted or deluded, until his face became worn too and ascetic and

  partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed her.

  Then, she recalled (standing where he had left her, holding her brush),

  worries had fretted it--not so nobly. He must have had his doubts

  about that table, she supposed; whether the table was a real table;

  whether it was worth the time he gave to it; whether he was able after

  all to find it. He had had doubts, she felt, or he would have asked

  less of people. That was what they talked about late at night

  sometimes, she suspected; and then next day Mrs Ramsay looked tired,

  and Lily flew into a rage with him over some absurd little thing. But

  now he had nobody to talk to about that table, or his boots, or his

  knots; and he was like a lion seeking whom he could devour, and his

  face had that touch of desperation, of exaggeration in it which alarmed

  her, and made her pull her skirts about her. And then, she recalled,

  there was that sudden revivification, that sudden flare (when she

  praised his boots), that sudden recovery of vitality and interest in

  ordinary human things, which too passed and changed (for he was always

  changing, and hid nothing) into that other final phase which was new to

  her and had, she owned, made herself ashamed of her own irritability,

  when it seemed as if he had shed worries and ambitions, and the hope of

  sympathy and the desire for praise, had entered some other region, was

  drawn on, as if by curiosity, in dumb colloquy, whether with himself or

  another, at the head of that little procession out of one's range. An

  extraordinary face! The gate banged.

  3

  So they're gone, she thought, sighing with relief and disappointment.

  Her sympathy seemed to be cast back on her, like a bramble sprung

  across her face. She felt curiously divided, as if one part of her

  were drawn out there--it was a still day, hazy; the Lighthouse looked

  this morning at an immense distance; the other had fixed itself

  doggedly, solidly, here on the lawn. She saw her canvas as if it had

  floated up and placed itself white and uncompromising directly before

  her. It seemed to rebuke her with its cold stare for all this hurry

  and agitation; this folly and waste of emotion; it drastically recalled

  her and spread through her mind first a peace, as her disorderly

  sensations (he had gone and she had been so sorry for him and she had

  said nothing) trooped off the field; and then, emptiness. She looked

  blankly at the canvas, with its uncompromising white stare; from the

  canvas to the garden. There was something (she stood screwing up her

  little Chinese eyes in her small puckered face), something she

  remembered in the relations of those lines cutting across, slicing

  down, and in the mass of the hedge with its green cave of blues and

  browns, which had stayed in her mind; which had tied a knot in her mind

  so that at odds and ends of time, involuntarily, as she walked along

  the Brompton Road, as she brushed her hair, she found herself painting

  that picture, passing her eye over it, and untying the knot in

  imagination. But there was all the difference in the world between

  this planning airily away from the canvas and actually taking her brush

  and making the first mark.

  She had taken the wrong brush in her agitation at Mr Ramsay's presence,

  and her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the wrong

  angle. And now that she had ut that right, and in so doing had subdued

  the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention and made

  her remember how she w
as such and such a person, had such and such

  relations to people, she took her hand and raised her brush. For a

  moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the

  air. Where to begin?--that was the question at what point to make

  the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to

  innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in

  idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves

  shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer

  among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the

  risk must be run; the mark made.

  With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at

  the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive

  stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas;

  it left a running mark. A second time she did it--a third time. And

  so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical

  movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes

  another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing,

  striking, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which

  had no sooner settled there than they enclosed ( she felt it looming

  out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next

  wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more

  formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping

  back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of

  community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient

  enemy of hers--this other thing, this truth, this reality, which

  suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of apperarances

  and commanded reluctant. Why always be drawn out and haled away? Why

  not left in peace, to talk to Mr Carmichael on the lawn? It was an

  exacting form of intercourse anyhow. Other worshipful objects were

  content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but

  this form, were it only the shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a

  wicker table, roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight

  in which one was bound to be worsted. Always (it was in her nature, or

  in her sex, she did not know which) before she exchanged the fluidity

  of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of

  nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body,

  hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all

  the blasts of doubt. Why then did she do it? She looked at the

  canvas, lightly scored with running lines. It would be hung in the

  servants' bedrooms. It would be rolled up and stuffed under a sofa.

  What was the good of doing it then, and she heard some voice saying she

  couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in

  one of those habitual currents in which after a certain time experience

  forms in the mind, so that one repeats words without being aware any

  longer who originally spoke them.

  Can't paint, can't write, she murmured monotonously, anxiously

  considering what her plan of attack should be. For the mass loomed

  before her; it protruded; she felt it pressing on her eyeballs. Then,

  as if some juice necessary for the lubrication of her faculties were

  spontaneously squirted, she began precariously dipping among the blues

  and umbers, moving her brush hither and thither, but it was now heavier

  and went slower, as if it had fallen in with some rhythm which was

  dictated to her (she kept looking at the hedge, at the canvas) by what

  she rhythm was strong enough to bear her along with it on its current.

  Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she

  lost consciousness of outer things, and her name and her personality

  and her appearance, and whether Mr Carmichael was there or not, her

  mind kept throwing up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings,

  and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting over that glaring,

  hideously difficult white space, while she modelled it with greens and

  blues.

  Charles Tansley used to say that, she remembered, women can't paint,

  can't write. Coming up behind her, he had stood close beside her, a

  thing she hated, as she painted her on this very spot. "Shag tobacco,"

  he said, "fivepence an ounce," parading his poverty, his principles.

  (But the war had drawn the sting of her femininity. Poor devils, one

  thought, poor devils, of both sexes.) He was always carrying a book

  about under his arm--a purple book. He "worked." He sat, she

  remembered, working in a blaze of sun. At dinner he would sit right in

  the middle of the view. But after all, she reflected, there was the

  scene on the beach. One must remember that. It was a windy morning.

  They had all gone down to the beach. Mrs Ramsay sat down and wrote

  letters by a rock. She wrote and wrote. "Oh," she said, looking up at

  something floating in the sea, "is it a lobster pot? Is it an upturned

  boat?" She was so short-sighted that she could not see, and then

  Charles Tansley became as nice as he could possibly be. He began

  playing ducks and drakes. They chose little flat black stones and sent

  them skipping over the waves. Every now and then Mrs Ramsay looked up

  over her spectacles and laughed at them. What they said she could not

  remember, but only she and Charles throwing stones and getting on very

  well all of a sudden and Mrs Ramsay watching them. She was highly

  conscious of that. Mrs Ramsay, she thought, stepping back and screwing

  up her eyes. (It must have altered the design a good deal when she was

  sitting on the step with James. There must have been a shadow.) When

  she thought of herself and Charles throwing ducks and drakes and of the

  whole scene on the beach, it seemed to depend somehow upon Mrs Ramsay

  sitting under the rock, with a pad on her knee, writing letters. (She

  wrote innumerable letters, and sometimes the wind took them and she and

  Charles just saved a page from the sea.) But what a power was in the

  human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there writing under the

  rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers,

  irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that

  and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite

  (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful)

  something--this scene on the beach for example, this moment of

  friendship and liking--which survived, after all these years complete,

  so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there

  it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art.

  "Like a work of art," she repeated, looking from her canvas to the

  drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And,

  resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which

  traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general

  question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as

  these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood

  over her, paused over her, darkened over
her. What is the meaning of

  life? That was all--a simple question; one that tended to close in on

  one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great

  revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there struck unexpectedly

  in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and

  Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs Ramsay bringing them

  together; Mrs Ramsay saying, "Life stand still here"; Mrs Ramsay making

  of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself

  tried to make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the

  nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this

  eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the

  leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs

  Ramsay said. "Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!" she repeated. She owed it all

  to her.

  All was silence. Nobody seemed yet to be stirring in the house. She

  looked at it there sleeping in the early sunlight with its windows

  green and blue with the reflected leaves. The faint thought she was

  thinking of Mrs Ramsay seemed in consonance with this quiet house; this

  smoke; this fine early morning air. Faint and unreal, it was amazingly

  pure and exciting. She hoped nobody would open the window or come out

  of the house, but that she might be left alone to go on thinking, to go

  on painting. She turned to her canvas. But impelled by some curiosity,

  driven by the discomfort of the sympathy which she held undischarged,

  she walked a pace or so to the end of the lawn to see whether, down

  there on the beach, she could see that little company setting sail.

  Down there among the little boats which floated, some with their sails

  furled, some slowly, for it was very calm moving away, there was one

  rather apart from the others. The sail was even now being hoisted.

  She decided that there in that very distant and entirely silent little

  boat Mr Ramsay was sitting with Cam and James. Now they had got the

  sail up; now after a little flagging and silence, she watched the boat

  take its way with deliberation past the other boats out to sea.

  4

  The sails flapped over their heads. The water chuckled and slapped the

  sides of the boat, which drowsed motionless in the sun. Now and then

  the sails rippled with a little breeze in them, but the ripple ran over

  them and ceased. The boat made no motion at all. Mr Ramsay sat in the

  middle of the boat. He would be impatient in a moment, James thought,

  and Cam thought, looking at her father, who sat in the middle of the

  boat between them (James steered; Cam sat alone in the bow) with his

  legs tightly curled. He hated hanging about. Sure enough, after

  fidgeting a second or two, he said something sharp to Macalister's boy,

  who got out his oars and began to row. But their father, they knew,

  would never be content until they were flying along. He would keep

  looking for a breeze, fidgeting, saying things under his breath, which

  Macalister and and Macalister's boy would overhear, and they would both

  be made horribly uncomfortable. He had made them come. He had forced

  them to come. In their anger they hoped that the breeze would never

  rise, that he might be thwarted in every possible way, since he had

  forced them to come against their wills.

  All the way down to the beach they had lagged behind together, though

  he bade them "Walk up, walk up," without speaking. Their heads were

  bent down, their heads were pressed down by some remorseless gale.

  Speak to him they could not. They must come; they must follow. They

  must walk behind him carrying brown paper parcels. But they vowed, in

  silence, as they walked, to stand by each other and carry out the great

  compact--to resist tyranny to the death. So there they would sit, one

  at one end of the boat, one at the other, in silence. They would say

  nothing, only look at him now and then where he sat with his legs

  twisted, frowning and fidgeting, and pishing and pshawing and muttering