Welcome to “The Deathmarch to the Lighthouse” — a group read of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.
I think we have something like 15 or 20 people planning to read this go-around — a nice solid number. Simple math, however, tells us only that two will finish, and I won’t be one of of them. Still, as my Italian nanny used to say: “il per la matematica è una cosa della cera ed i numeri sono fatti della cera.” Which means (roughly) “math is a wax thing, and numbers are made of wax.” She was a crazy old coot.
For anyone new, here’s how it works: every Wednesday I post an entry saying how far we’re reading that week. Folks drop by and comment over the next seven days.
But Are There Prizes?
Yes! There are prizes! Finish the book and comment each week, and you’ll receive a genuine To-the-Lighthouse-themed talisman hand-imbued with a fractional sampling of the raw power wielded by Magneto, Master of Magnetism. (on the off-chance we get more people than we’re expecting, let’s cap that at 30 hand-imbued talismans)
Be sure to shout out in the comments (click on “Whaddya Think” below) if you’re on the ‘march, both to stay talisman-qualified, and so’s we can get a headcount. Don’t sweat it if you fall a little behind on the reading — “I’m so far behind!” actually counts as a legitimate comment. And of course, If you’ve read the book before, try to keep comments from getting ahead of the weekly reading.
And that’s it. Mostly, it’s just a chance to read a great book, share thoughts and questions, and shake a fist at that old wax devil, math, by making it through to the end.
See ya on the trail,
-Cecil
Next Wednesday: We meet at the end of Book 1, Chapter 7, where someone’s about to say nothing and take opium.
"…something like the supervisor of an entire team of political agents…"
the weather’s turning here; somehow just right for a deathmarch.
For once I am not far behind! I read Mrs. Dalloway in college. Virginia Woolf has an incredibly divine gift with words. Sometimes this gift requires that I read a sentence 3 times instead of one, but I’m not sorry after I’ve had the chance to absorb her words.
Once again, I point out, nonpedantically: if the book is not long, the march is not Death.
But Cecil is the judge and sole arbiter here, so in I am. Not that anyone has to beg me to read Woolf. (Thanks for begging anyway, CV.) I’m off to a rocky start: I began to read the foreword by Eudora Welty and got a full page into it before I realized “spoilers!”. I skipped over the rest to read the first five pages in antici…pation of the DMTtL. Here we go, sports racers.
I consider myself an avid and voracious reader and a fast reader. But in my opinion, it qualifies as a deathmarch if I had to read a sentence 5 times to understand it, no matter the length of the book.
Cecil had a nanny? Now I feel, if not proletarian, at least what the rich folks in New Canaan used to call “very middle-middle.”
oh my gosh oh my gosh. I feel like a kid with a new puppy. I read this a few years ago while getting my lit degree and it is just one of my all time faves. Lush and hugely rewarding. It was a spiritual experience, seriously, when I read this book for the first time. The way Woolf structures meaning, from the granular level of word choice and narrative voice, to sentence, paragraph, chapter and novel structure is amazing. As a writer, figuring out what she has done and how she does it, how she manages to immerse her readers so completely in the nonlinear, emotional surge of each character, the inexplicable tides of their emotions, and ours, as human beings, and yet, somehow explain us – words pall. In this character Woolf enmeshes us in darkness, in another, she takes us on a spiritual voyage. OK, I’m rambling. Gushing, even. But, dense? Yes. Complex? Yes. Who wants a diet of sugar all the time? Give me meat, I say! Something to chew!
I am in, yes I am. I also read this one a while ago when I was a lil’ lit major and I remember, well, nothing. (Did I read it? I certainly have a copy with the ASUC-store sticker.) I think Woolf is a good choice for a d’march–I don’t think I’d try her again otherwise. Here’s hoping that I can wrap my head around her better this time around.
Dumpster: not only did I have a nanny, and I don’t mean to brag here, but she was 9 feet tall and spun all my clothes out of genuine spider webs. Kind of gross, really.
Started the book this morning, btw, and I’ve already read 6 beautiful sentences 5 times each.
-Cecil
In anticipation of this great gathering of minds, I read the first 30 pages while enroute to Maryland to help my daughter who had gone into labor last Saturday. My daughter delivered her baby (Caleb) 6 weeks early, and I was already in more than a stream of consciousness frame of mind while on the plane. Regarding the book, I must say, I had forgotten how bourgeois the whole Hebrides thing was. It really does fit in with Cecil’s nanny story (the bourgeois part), although his clarification made me think that we were reading Great Expectations (Miss Haversham and all) instead. I am really looking forward to the March and think that we need a special posting for Halloween. P.S. Baby is finally out of intensive care nursery and everyone is doing fine.
heartfelt congratulations, computilo.
Not entirely sure how I am supposed to do this so here goes:
I only got through the first twenty pages, having started yesterday, but am once again enthralled with Woolf’s mastery of personality through language. It is difficult to follow, and challenging to simply read as a story because the tone requires a certain amount of empathy and understanding of the character narrating at that moment. at the same time you are forced to jump from person to person in an almost schizophrenic movement of personality and character –
A short book with a need for slow reading, I am much enjoying the march so far!
OK. I’m in. This book might be a good fit for me since I am a painfully slow reader to begin with.
Read on the treadmill yesterday. Charles is the father, right?
A non-spoiler quote from the Forward for those who may be on the edge:
“Personal discovery is the direct and, I suspect, the appropriate route to To The Lighthouse. Yet discovery, in the reading of a great original work, does not depend on its initial newness to us. No matter how often we begin it again, it seems to expand and expand again ahead of us. Reading To The Lighthouse now, I am still unwarned, still unprepared in the face of it, and my awe and my delight remain forever cloudless.â€?
–Eudora Welty
I am armed with a round-trip plane ticket between San Francisco and Heathrow and a copy of the book I got at the flea market for a dollar. Looking forward to marching with you all…
I’m still working on the first sentence and it’s been a couple of days now. Does anyone have a good strategy for getting beyond the first period?
alex–whenever you hit a sentence like that, skip it! then repeat the procedure as needed….
Erin: I think Charles is the atheist, friend of the father. Seems like he might be younger, but that’s just a guess (I’m only about 1/2 through the week’s reading.)
Alex: fwiw, I sometimes read trickier patches out loud — slows me down, helps me find the rhythm.
-Cecil
e. and Cecil thanks for the advice. I was able to make it past the first sentence by skipping it over and reading the second sentence aloud. I’ll let you know what happens with the third sentence, when I reach it.
Al:
The third sentence is a doozy — skip that one too. The fourth sentence is pretty good though. I’ll tell you what it means. It means: “It was fringed with joy.”
-Cecil
This second reading is certainly easier than the first. With the first reading I got used to Woolf contantly manipulating reader expectations and understandings of just whose head we are in, and whose emotions /judgements / experiences we are reading about. The narrator plays such a strong role in this work, constantly commenting and shining light – or obsuring, perhaps – what we have read. I am also reminded about how Woolf will state a perception or an opinion, and then immediately replace it with its opposite. One moment Mrs. Ramsay thinks of her husband, “To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head…” Two sentences later we read, “There was nobody whom she reverenced as she reverenced him.” And that’s the tip of the iceberg with this kind of thing. She deliberately provokes us to figure out what the *el* is going on.
i’m so glad to be reading this again. woolf is astonishing. all those contradictory thoughts make sense to me–input/response/input/response…. i think she’s just getting at what we do before we integrate our own semiconscious noise, before we produce a more coherent viewpoint that suits us. and somehow she makes it seem as though it’s happening in real time.
and then there’s also what feels like a physical quality to her writing–of one thinker passing the baton to the next (i wonder if linklater was thinking of woolf when he was working slackers out–a kind of tag, you’re it approach to storytelling).
o.k. i’m back in for this deathmarch but…. i had to buy this book a 2nd time because i left the first one in a shopping cart a Loews Home Center, the bookmark at page 30. that will teach me to lock my keys in my apartment, have to meet my friend sasha (who has a spare set) with her two kids only to have the 3 year old move the book from where she was sitting in the shopping cart, where i would remember it, to the bottom of the main compartment where i ultimately left it for some moron who was probably buying parts for a tee-pee. i’m sure whoever finds it will take it home and promply use it as liner for a bird cage. a bunch of frilly words, jumping from host to host like a bad science fiction creature. people milling about miserably, unhappy with one another, staring at waves, holding hands and painting pictures. something better happen in this book or i’ll go on a rampage.
Charles is not the father (though he appears to verbally abuse the kids like the father). I think he’s got the hots for Mrs. Ramsay. I’m also going to change my Deathmarch name going forward to Minta, because I like it and helps me keep the characters straight amidst the confusing narration changes.
In the end I couldn’t bring myself to sit out this march. I wish I knew how to quit you.
I had a hard time getting started, though. There’s something intimidating about this book, in a completely different way from, say, Gravity’s Rainbow. And reading Eudora Welty’s intro didn’t help. (There were spoilers in there? I couldn’t understand what the hell Eudora was talking about most of the time.) Maybe I should say there’s something intimidatingly female about this book–I fear my gender puts me at a disadvantage, and I don’t like being at a disadvantage. But I’ve decided to see it as a challenge, and so far I am making good progress (finished this week’s generously short pageload before noon on Monday). Great stuff in the last chapter–insightful and painful, and filled with lovely phrases like “delicious fecundity” and “arid scimitar.” (Did Virginia Woolf ever write porn, I mean erotica? Seems like she’d be real good at it.)
Well, I’d probably better get going now before I lower the tone of the discourse any further. See you next week.
I began to read and kept thinking, “Why does this all seem so familiar?” And I kept having flashes of Ken Branagh. Then it finally hit me, I saw the movie with KB and Rosemary Harris. Sigh. I hate seeing the movie before I read the book. But the amazing thing is that her language is so wonderfully wrought that I cannot stop myself from reading aloud. Fortunately, the cat doesn’t mind. This makes a nice change from my other two current reads: “Victorian London” and “Philosophy Through Literature”. And, you were right, Cecil, Jonathan Edwards seems to be waiting paitently.
okay… i didn’t understand the posting thing. i thought we were supposed to comment AFTER reading the allotted number of pages for the week, which i will complete… soon.
Haven’t read a thing. See you next week./Vlad
I just realized that I completely missed the punchline of my previous comment.
Q: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
A: I am.