Weekend Quote 18: Mrs. Dalloway

This is, or would perhaps be, my longest Weekend Quote—if not passage—so far…. But, I just can’t ignore this beautiful passage from Virginia Woolf which shows her genius in mind description. This is taken from Lucrezia “Rezia” Warren Smith, a suffering wife of a mad man—either schizophrenia or post-war nerve disorder—Septimus. Rezia loved Septimus a lot, and she always tried to save him from humiliation in public, by making him looks normal, so that people won’t see his abnormal behavior. This, and feeling that Septimus did not love her anymore, tortured her. She felt lonely because she must endure it alone, having nobody to tell about it. And Woolf has described Rezia’s deep feeling in this…

“There was nobody. Her words faded. So a rocket fades. Its sparks, having grazed their way into the night, surrender to it, dark descends, pour over the outlines of houses and towers; bleak hillsides soften and fall in. But though they are gone, the night is full of them; robbed of colour, blank windows, they exist more ponderously, give out what the frame daylight fails to transmit—the trouble and suspense of things conglomerated there in the darkness; reft of the relieve which dawn brings when washing the walls white and gray, spotting each window-pane, lifting the mist from the fields, showing the red-brown cows peacefully grazing, all is once more decked out to the eye; exists again.”

Does being alone in a great suffer feel like dissolving into the darkest of the night? Maybe it’s when we are in our deepest despair. But somehow, the sun will shine again, we exist again. Or is it about bearing humiliation? That Rezia wanted to dissolve into the dark, but she couldn't hide it forever from the world, that one morning, everything would be clear, and everyone can see it? I don’t know, until now I still vaguely hold the meaning of that passage. It deserves my deeper reflection. Can you light me?

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