Rough Cut

I spent this week crafting an extremely long and arguably lugubrious analysis of Rilke’s First Elegy. Today, late on Sunday, I find that the analysis is hardly complete and, worse, uninteresting. So I’ll set the Rilke analysis on the shelf for next week, hope it ferments into something if not interesting then at least smelly, and instead entertain you with the sweetest of topics: Virginia Woolf.

Stay tuned. If you’d like to prepare for next week (provided there is one), enjoy Rilke’s First Elegy here.

Did your favorite friend send this to you?

This Week in Virginia Woolf

These winter Sundays*, New York has seemed to tilt underneath me like a ball maze—I feel myself rolling like a pebble through the walls of this city, shifted by some uncontrollable gravity of impulse or text message until falling into a trap or settling neatly into my appropriate finale.

Today, my appropriate finale was a deep nap on the couch of a friend’s apartment, where I had awkwardly curled between unfolded laundry and a hamster cage. I was supposed to be Reading, but my friend had begun to do dishes and something about the familiar tinkle (in its most literary sense) of porcelain under water wilted my book and warmed me into rest. It was Very Good.

Last week, my finale was different, and it involved the grand marble slab on 5th Avenue.

Yes: New York’s big hands rolled me from the Upper East Side to the West Village to Jackson Heights, under Midtown, and finally into into the Virginia Woolf exhibit at the New York Public Library. Most of you will know that Virginia Woolf is my dearest and favorite writer. I feel about her as one might an imaginary friend—that she exists solely for me, that she speaks with me, plays with me, and sits up late with me reminding me sternly of that writing could possibly be. She is frequently disappointed in me. As I awaited my entry to the gallery of her letters and early works, I prepared myself for ascension.

Unfortunately, I arrived with a friend at closing time, so no sooner had I begun to savor the first flicks of Jinny’s handwriting, noted the fibers curling from those wobblingly illustrated early editions, and commented on the very un-Bloomsbury shade of Museum Purple used for the room, than the docent was sternly shuffling us along, shooing us out of the little chamber of books and notes as if it weren’t the holiest of crypts. We were exhumed. Echoes followed us through the halls: “Find the exit. Find the exit.”

How cruel it was. How perfect.

Here I was, closer than I’ve even been to My Person and she was being pulled away from me. What wonderful urgency. What an electric thing to walk toward Virginia and to not experience stillness, but resistance. It felt like an illicit love affair in which one operates via sleight-of-hand, within glances and brushes—the way churning water obscures its wildest contents. Too much time may have cooled the moment. Virginia must exist as a sensation, never a statue.

This week, I read Moments of Being, a collection of memoir pieces by Woolf, and I was reminded of Virginia’s attraction to “shocks,” “exceptional moments,” or “scenes.” She ventures “that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene—for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of their ‘reality’. Is this liability of mine to scene receiving the origin of my writing impulse?”

I don’t know, Virginia, but it helps. In another piece, she speaks about the joy she finds in writing down these scenes, in hoping to make sense of them:

As the floor tilted and I stumbled out the front door of the library and toward the mahogany tables of the Harvard Club, it was clear: the afternoon with Virginia was not cotton wool; it was a scene.

Stuff That Makes You Say, “Mhm.”

• Please listen to Nick Offerman (of Ron Swanson fame) on On Being. Tune in around 21 minutes to hear Offerman tear up as he speaks about Wendell Berry—the poet and writer who has so deeply influenced his life. If you need a reminder of the impact of poetry, here it is.

• Delightfully, I’ve stumbled into the zone of literary Twitter that includes varieties of interpretations of book covers. Two of my favorites include Mugs-As-Books and, perhaps even more intriguingly, Taylor Swift-As-Books.

• Poet and painter Etel Annan speaks of beauty: “I am very sensitive to beauty. We don’t speak of beauty anymore in art criticism. We don’t mention beauty. It’s démodé—out of fashion—but it isn’t really beauty. It’s an inner sense and it makes us happy. It’s not complicated. We need it.”

A Writing Prompt: Beavers

First: I am still waiting on your reports from the butterfly sanctuary. Let’s get to it, shan’t we?

Next: Read Marie Howe’s great assignment of gathering 10 observations of the actual world. Endure the things themselves—just in the way that Virginia looks to see that which is “permanent.” Gather them together like this sweet little beaver and see what water they divert.

I look forward to meeting you all back here next week to dive into some more modernism. Until then, enjoy these moments of Virginia:

“I do not know how far I differ from other people.”

“We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

“I feel that by writing I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else.”

“Am I alone in my egotism when I say that never does the pale light of dawn filter through the blinds of 52 Tavistock Square but I open my eyes and exclaim, ‘Good God! Here I am again!’—not always with pleasure, often with pain; sometimes with a spasm of acute disgust—but always, always with interest?”

Good God! Here I am again!

- Robiny

Croissant of the Week:

Stella & Fly, 88th & 1st

• Freshness: 7

• External Texture 8

• Internal Texture: 8

• Flavor: 8

• Overall: 7.75