'"Now they have all gone," said Louis. "I am alone. They have gone into the house for breakfast, and I am left standing by the wall among the flowers. It is very early, before lessons. Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. The flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing. I am a boy in grey flannels with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here. Down there my eyes are lidless eyes of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile. I see women passing with red pitchers to the river; I see camels swaying and men in turbans. I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.
Up here Bernard, Neville, Jinny and Susan (but not Rhoda) skim the flowerbeds with their nets. They skim the butterflies from the nodding tops of the flowers. They brush the surface of the world. Their nets are full of fluttering wings. 'Louis! Louis! Louis!' they shout. But they cannot see me. I am on the other side of the hedge. There are only little eyeholes among the leaves. O Lord, let them pass. Lord, let them lay their butterflies on a pocket-handkerchief on the gravel. Let them count out their tortoiseshells, their red admirals and cabbage whites. But let me be unseen. I am green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge. My hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth. My body is a stalk. I press the stalk. A drop oozes from the hole at the mouth and slowly, thickly, grows larger and larger. Now something pink passes the eyehole. Now an eye-beam is slid through the chink. Its beam strikes me. I am a boy in a grey flannel suit. She has found me. I am struck on the nape of the neck. She has kissed me. All is shattered."'
The Waves
(Page 5-6)
I did it.
I finally defeated this little bastard.
It took me a fortnight.
And it's only 167 pages long.
But ughhhhhh at long last it's over.
Quite possibly the most horrendously beautiful book i have ever read.
I say horrendous because Virginia Woolf's train-of-thought style is, at least for my feeble little brainpain, torturous to read.
It's impossible for me to focus for more than a few paragraphs with this style of writing.
My mind drifts off to more shallow lands, where Jensen Ackles is killing monsters and craving pie.
(Yes, you should be worried for my slowly disintegrating grey matter)
But it's so damn beautiful, with passages upon passages of what sounds like a childhood lost but never possessed and consequently the aches of growing older, that i couldn't not finish it.
That would be absurd and go against my strict policy of always finishing a book.
Mostly due to my sister tormenting me in my younger (not that younger) years for being a 'non-finisher'.
Do i have literary ADD?
(quizzed it, i have moderate ADD according to Doctor Internet. Yeah, well, the fickle bastard's also diagnosed me with cancer at least 12 times, so he can suck it)
Perhaps but at least i finished this little seductress!
I'll most likely never read it again, i'm not a complete masochist but i did it once.
Once was enough.
It's a weird sensation to both love and loathe a piece of literature.
Post a Comment