To The Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

let me find you one!" and all the rest of the usual chatter. One need

  not speak at all. One glided, one shook one's sails (there was a good

  deal of movement in the bay, boats were starting off) between things,

  beyond things. Empty it was not, but full to the brim. She seemed to

  be standing up to the lips in some substance, to move and float and

  sink in it, yes, for these waters were unfathomably deep. Into them

  had spilled so many lives. The Ramsays'; the children's; and all sorts

  of waifs and strays of things besides. A washer-woman with her basket;

  a rook, a red-hot poker; the purples and grey-greens of flowers: some

  common feeling which held the whole together.

  It was some such feeling of completeness perhaps which, ten years ago,

  standing almost where she stood now, had made her say that she must be

  in love with the place. Love had a thousand shapes. There might be

  lovers whose gift it was to choose out the elements of things and place

  them together and so, giving them a wholeness not theirs in life, make

  of some scene, or meeting of people (all now gone and separate), one of

  those globed compacted things over which thought lingers, and love

  plays.

  Her eyes rested on the brown speck of Mr Ramsay's sailing boat. They

  would be at the Lighthouse by lunch time she supposed. But the wind

  had freshened, and, as the sky changed slightly and the sea changed

  slightly and the boards altered their positions, the view, which a

  moment before had seemed miraculously fixed, was now unsatisfactory.

  The wind had blown the trail of smoke about; there was something

  displeasing about the placing of the ships.

  The disproportion there seemed to upset some harmony in her own mind.

  She felt an obscure distress. It was confirmed when she turned to her

  picture. She had been wasting her morning. For whatever reason she

  could not achieve that razor edge of balance between two opposite

  forces; Mr Ramsay and the picture; which was necessary. There was

  something perhaps wrong with the design? Was it, she wondered, that

  the line of the wall wanted breaking, was it that the mass of the trees

  was too heavy? She smiled ironically; for had she not thought, when

  she began, that she had solved her problem?

  What was the problem then? She must try to get hold of something tht

  evaded her. It evaded her when she thought of Mrs Ramsay; it evaded

  her now when she thought of her picture. Phrases came. Visions came.

  Beautiful pictures. Beautiful phrases. But what she wished to get hold

  of was that very jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been

  made anything. Get that and start afresh; get that and start afresh;

  she said desperately, pitching herself firmly again before her easel.

  It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the

  human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at

  the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on. She stared,

  frowning. There was the hedge, sure enough. But one got nothing by

  soliciting urgently. One got only a glare in the eye from looking at

  the line of the wall, or from thinking--she wore a grey hat. She was

  astonishingly beautiful. Let it come, she thought, if it will come.

  For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought,

  where is one?

  Here on the grass, on the ground, she thought, sitting down, and

  examining with her brush a little colony of plantains. For the lawn

  was very rough. Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could

  not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was

  happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a

  traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the

  train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town,

  or that mule-cart, or that woman at work in the fields, again. The

  lawn was the world; they were up here together, on this exalted

  station, she thought, looking at old Mr Carmichael, who seemed (though

  they had not said a word all this time) to share her thoughts. And she

  would never see him again perhaps. He was growing old. Also, she

  remembered, smiling at the slipper that dangled from his foot, he was

  growing famous. People said that his poetry was "so beautiful." They

  went and published things he had written forty years ago. There was a

  famous man now called Carmichael, she smiled, thinking how many shapes

  one person might wear, how he was that in the newspapers, but here the

  same as he had always been. He looked the same--greyer, rather.

  Yes, he looked the same, but somebody had said, she recalled, that when

  he had heard of Andrew Ramsay's death (he was killed in a second by a

  shell; he should have been a great mathematician) Mr Carmichael had

  "lost all interest in life." What did it mean--that? she wondered. Had

  he marched through Trafalgar Square grasping a big stick? Had he

  turned pages over and over, without reading them, sitting in his room

  in St. John's Wood alone? She did not know what he had done, when he

  heard that Andrew was killed, but she felt it in him all the same.

  They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the

  sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine. But this was one way

  of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to

  sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple

  down into the distant heather. She knew him in that way. She knew

  that he had changed somehow. She had never read a line of his poetry.

  She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonorously.

  It was seasoned and mellow. It was about the desert and the camel. It

  was about the palm tree and the sunset. It was extremely impersonal;

  it said something about death; it said very little about love. There

  was an impersonality about him. He wanted very little of other people.

  Had he not always lurched rather awkwardly past the drawing-room window

  with some newspaper under his arm, trying to avoid Mrs Ramsay whom for

  some reason he did not much like? On that account, of course, she

  would always try to make him stop. He would bow to her. He would halt

  unwillingly and bow profoundly. Annoyed that he did not want anything

  of her, Mrs Ramsay would ask him (Lily could hear her) wouldn't he like

  a coat, a rug, a newspaper? No, he wanted nothing. (Here he bowed.)

  There was some quality in her which he did not much like. It was

  perhaps her masterfulness, her positiveness, something matter-of-fact

  in her. She was so direct.

  (A noise drew her attention to the drawing-room window--the squeak of a

  hinge. The light breeze was toying with the window.)

  There must have been people who disliked her very much, Lily thought

  (Yes; she realised that the drawing-room step was empty, but it had no

  effect on her whatever. She did not want Mrs Ramsay now.)--People who

  thought her too sure, too drastic.

  Also, her beauty offended people probably. How monotonous, they would

  say, and the same always! They preferred another type--the dark, the

  vivacious. Then she was weak with her
husband. She let him make those

  scenes. Then she was reserved. Nobody knew exactly what had happened

  to her. And (to go back to Mr Carmichael and his dislike) one could not

  imagine Mrs Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on

  the lawn. It was unthinkable. Without saying a word, the only token of

  her errand a basket on her arm, she went off to the town, to the poor,

  to sit in some stuffy little bedroom. Often and often Lily had seen

  her go silently in the midst of some game, some discussion, with her

  basket on her arm, very upright. She had noted her return. She had

  thought, half laughing (she was so methodical with the tea cups), half

  moved (her beauty took one's breath away), eyes that are closing in

  pain have looked on you. You have been with them there.

  And then Mrs Ramsay would be annoyed because somebody was late, or the

  butter not fresh, or the teapot chipped. And all the time she was

  saying that the butter was not fresh one would be thinking of Greek

  temples, and how beauty had been with them there in that stuffy little

  room. She never talked of it--she went, punctually, directly. It was

  her instinct to go, an instinct like the swallows for the south, the

  artichokes for the sun, turning her infallibly to the human race,

  making her nest in its heart. And this, like all instincts, was a

  little distressing to people who did not share it; to Mr Carmichael

  perhaps, to herself certainly. Some notion was in both of them about

  the ineffectiveness of action, the supremacy of thought. Her going was

  a reproach to them, gave a different twist to the world, so that they

  were led to protest, seeing their own prepossessions disappear, and

  clutch at them vanishing. Charles Tansley did that too: it was part of

  the reason why one disliked him. He upset the proportions of one's

  world. And what had happened to him, she wondered, idly stirring the

  platains with her brush. He had got his fellowship. He had married;

  he lived at Golder's Green.

  She had gone one day into a Hall and heard him speaking during the war.

  He was denouncing something: he was condemning somebody. He was

  preaching brotherly love. And all she felt was how could he love his

  kind who did not know one picture from another, who had stood behind

  her smoking shag ("fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe") and making it his

  business to tell her women can't write, women can't paint, not so much

  that he believed it, as that for some odd reason he wished it? There

  he was lean and red and raucous, preaching love from a platform (there

  were ants crawling about among the plantains which she disturbed with

  her brush--red, energetic, shiny ants, rather like Charles Tansley).

  She had looked at him ironically from her seat in the half-empty hall,

  pumping love into that chilly space, and suddenly, there was the old

  cask or whatever it was bobbing up and down among the waves and Mrs

  Ramsay looking for her spectacle case among the pebbles. "Oh, dear!

  What a nuisance! Lost again. Don't bother, Mr Tansley. I lose

  thousands every summer," at which he pressed his chin back against his

  collar, as if afraid to sanction such exaggeration, but could stand it

  in her whom he liked, and smiled very charmingly. He must have

  confided in her on one of those long expeditions when people got

  separated and walked back alone. He was educating his little sister,

  Mrs Ramsay had told her. It was immensely to his credit. Her own idea

  of him was grotesque, Lily knew well, stirring the plantains with her

  brush. Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque.

  They served private purposes of one's own. He did for her instead of a

  whipping-boy. She found herself flagellating his lean flanks when she

  was out of temper. If she wanted to be serious about him she had to

  help herself to Mrs Ramsay's sayings, to look at him through her eyes.

  She raised a little mountain for the ants to climb over. She reduced

  them to a frenzy of indecision by this interference in their cosmogony.

  Some ran this way, others that.

  One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs

  of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought.

  Among them, must be one that was stone blind to her beauty. One wanted

  most some secret sense, fine as air, with which to steal through

  keyholes and surround her where she sat knitting, talking, sitting

  silent in the window alone; which took to itself and treasured up like

  the air which held the smoke of the steamer, her thoughts, her

  imaginations, her desires. What did the hedge mean to her, what did

  the garden mean to her, what did it mean to her when a wave broke?

  (Lily looked up, as she had seen Mrs Ramsay look up; she too heard a

  wave falling on the beach.) And then what stirred and trembled in her

  mind when the children cried, "How's that? How's that?" cricketing?

  She would stop knitting for a second. She would look intent. Then she

  would lapse again, and suddenly Mr Ramsay stopped dead in his pacing in

  front of her and some curious shock passed through her and seemed to

  rock her in profound agitation on its breast when stopping there he

  stood over her and looked down at her. Lily could see him.

  He stretched out his hand and raised her from her chair. It seemed

  somehow as if he had done it before; as if he had once bent in the same

  way and raised her from a boat which, lying a few inches off some

  island, had required that the ladies should thus be helped on shore by

  the gentlemen. An old-fashioned nearly, crinolines and peg-top

  trousers. Letting herself be helped by him, Mrs Ramsay had thought

  (Lily supposed) the time has come now. Yes, she would say it now.

  Yes, she would marry him. And she stepped slowly, quietly on shore.

  Probably she said one word only, letting her hand rest still in his. I

  will marry you, she might have said, with her hand in his; but no more.

  Time after time the same thrill had passed between them--obviously it

  had, Lily thought, smoothing a way for her ants. She was not

  inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been

  given years ago folded up; something she had seen. For in the rough

  and tumble of daily life, with all those children about, all those

  visitors, one had constantly a sense of repetition--of one thing

  falling where another had fallen, and so setting up an echo which

  chimed in the air and made it full of vibrations.

  But it would be a mistake, she thought, thinking how they walked off

  together, arm in arm, past the greenhouse, to simplify their

  relationship. It was no monotony of bliss--she with her impulses and

  quicknesses; he with his shudders and glooms. Oh, no. The bedroom door

  would slam violently early in the morning. He would start from the

  table in a temper. He would whizz his plate through the window. Then

  all through the house there would be a sense of doors slamming and

  blinds fluttering, as if a gusty wind were blowing and people scudded

  about trying in a hasty way to fasten hatches and make things ship-

  shape. She had met Paul Rayley like th
at one day on the stairs. It had

  been an earwig, apparently. Other people might find centipedes. They

  had laughed and laughed.

  But it tired Mrs Ramsay, it cowed her a little--the plates whizzing

  and the doors slamming. And there would fall between them sometimes

  long rigid Lily in her, half plaintive, half resentful, she seemed

  unable to surmount the tempest calmly, or to laugh as they laughed, but

  in her weariness perhaps concealed something. She brooded and sat

  silent. After a time he would hang stealthily about the places where

  she was--roaming under the window where she sat writing letters or

  talking, for she would take care to be busy when he passed, and evade

  him, and pretend not to see him. Then he would turn smooth as silk,

  affable, urbane, and try to win her so. Still she would hold off, and

  now she would assert for a brief season some of those prides and airs

  the due of her beauty which she was generally utterly without; would

  turn her head; would look so, over her shoulder, always with some

  Minta, Paul, or William Bankes at her side. At length, standing

  outside the group the very figure of a famished wolfhound (Lily got up

  off the grass and stood looking at the steps, at the window, where she

  had seen him), he would say her name, once only, for all the world like

  a wolf barking in the snow, but still she held back; and he would say

  it once more, and this time something in the tone would rouse her, and

  she would go to him, leaving them all of a sudden, and they would walk

  off together among the pear trees, the cabbages, and the raspberry

  beds. They would have it out together. But with what attitudes and

  with what words? Such a dignity was theirs in this relationship that,

  turning away, she and Paul and Minta would hide their curiosity and

  their discomfort, and begin picking flowers, throwing balls,

  chattering, until it was time for dinner, and there they were, he at

  one end of the table, she at the other, as usual.

  "Why don't some of you take up botany?.. With all those legs and arms

  why doesn't one of you...?" So they would talk as usual, laughing, for

  some quiver, as of a blade in the air, which came and went between them

  as if the usual sight of the children sitting round their soup plates

  had freshened itself in their eyes after that hour among the pears and

  the cabbages. Especially, Lily thought, Mrs Ramsay would glance at

  Prue. She sat in the middle between brothers and sisters, always

  occupied, it seemed, seeing that nothing went wrong so that she

  scarcely spoke herself. How Prue must have blamed herself for that

  earwig in the milk How white she had gone when Mr Ramsay threw his

  plate through the window! How she drooped under those long silences

  between them! Anyhow, her mother now would seem to be making it up to

  her; assuring her that everything was well; promising her that one of

  these days that same happiness would be hers. She had enjoyed it for

  less than a year, however.

  She had let the flowers fall from her basket, Lily thought, screwing up

  her eyes and standing back as if to look at her picture, which she was

  not touching, however, with all her faculties in a trance, frozen over

  superficially but moving underneath with extreme speed.

  She let her flowers fall from her basket, scattered and tumbled them on

  to the grass and, reluctantly and hesitatingly, but without question or

  complaint--had she not the faculty of obedience to perfection?--went

  too. Down fields, across valleys, white, flower-strewn--that was

  how she would have painted it. The hills were austere. It was rocky;

  it was steep. The waves sounded hoarse on the stones beneath. They

  went, the three of them together, Mrs Ramsay walking rather fast in

  front, as if she expected to meet some one round the corner.

  Suddenly the window at which she was looking was whitened by some light

  stuff behind it. At last then somebody had come into the drawing-room;

  somebody was sitting in the chair. For Heaven's sake, she prayed, let