![]() ![]() The book’s first section explores a summer where hope and possibility are alive in the Ramsay children: young James who longs to visit the lighthouse (but is disappointed by his father’s crushing refusal) and Minta, who will soon be engaged then Lily Briscoe the artist as she hopes to create a thing of beauty. It’s not the straight-ahead time of an energetic plot but subjective time as we experience it fragmented in the act of thought and memory. For these characters, time doesn’t advance in the usual way it hovers, moves in circles, looping back and then ahead. What’s wondrous and unique about this book is its sense of interiority, of deep and reflective consciousness. ![]() Endless waves break on the shore everyday life continues with its small, quotidian pleasures and miseries change touches everyone, and with it, grief, wonder and puzzlement over the mystery of being alive. Ramsay, their eight children, friends and visitors at a summer house on the Scottish coast. The novel illuminates the passage of time in the lives of Mr. ![]() I’ve just finished reading it again, meandering through sentences in which the reader drifts from one lucid thought to another, Woolf’s beautiful replication of the conscious mind at work. Summer’s the time for slow and meditative re-reading of old favourites, and at the top of my list is Virginia Woolf’s visionary 1927 novel, To The Lighthouse. ![]()
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