Woolf and her lighthouse

It’s been more than a decade since I read “To The Lighthouse.” Although I read many books then and since, no reading experience has ever come quite as close as reading this one. Though young and unworldly, I knew, after finishing the novel, I had just read a work that would stay with me for a long time. Even now, some of the passages from the book bubble up from the bottom of my numbed awareness, waking me out of my dead consciousness, as if I’ve never left reading it.

I still remember how I felt when I read it for the first time. I was unprepared for what I was about to embark on, taking days before finally ploughing through one third of the book. What makes the book so difficult at first reading is that the perspective shifts from person to person, the scene and the time along with it. I found myself flipping back and forth between the pages just to make sure if I’d not missed a page or so. At times, the perspective changes in a matter of a sentence without warning, confounding the reader. It was and still is a very difficult novel, and patience is the only sure way to get through this book, at least it was for me.

Though the story unfolds surrounding the Ramsey family, the book is not so much about them as it is about the internal monologues these different characters exert onto the page. It is the language what Virginia Woolf convinces the reader to feel for. What takes the center stage is the words themselves. Through words the readers are thrown about into the turmoils of characters’ psychology, where everything is at once real and elusive, this minute as calm as still water, the next the roaring sea.

I’m reading it again just to remind myself what words alone can accomplish, reliving the rapturous moments I had with the novel at my first encounter.