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 Today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday. Just knowing that she existed in the world and left behind the writing and thoughts that she did, is enough to inspire me to continue putting words together in savory combinations. She wrote  To the Lighthouse, whose sentences rank as some of the most  melancholy and gorgeous strands of prose I’ve read to date. Written in three different parts, the first captures the fleeting, slippery quality of holidays at a beloved house on the coast; the second describes what happens to the house and to its former inhabitants over the course of the next ten years, including the death of the beloved and unappreciated mother at the center; the third section involves a trip to the lighthouse itself, the resolution of a promise made many years previous. There is an aching to the novel, a shimmering feeling of realized and unrealized loss, like the droplets of water that hang from a tree branch in shining suspension, anticipating the inevitable fall and burst on the cement below.

Mrs. Dalloway is another favorite, as is Woolf’s essay on taking a walk through the dusky streets of London just as twilight passes through the city. It has taken me years to knock on and enter the door to Virginia Woolf’s writing room. I still feel like I’m standing in the doorway, waiting to step in completely.  

 Often times, I feel like a late intellectual bloomer, like I’m just started to understand concepts and constructs that others mastered years before, and I look forward to spending more time in the realms of Woolf, sinking into her golden prose, moving languidly through ideas that only she could capture in that certain way, on a crinkling writing pad.

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