If you like: large bodies of water, summer, subjectivity
To the Lighthouse is the best book about oceans.
Sorry, Jacques Cousteau, Moby Dick and that book they turned into a movie about a lighthouse and nice knitwear. Virginia Woolf has you beat.
"They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief."
In Woolf's narrative, being near water makes the heart expand, only to be chilled; or offers a comforting murmur that at a turn of mind can become "a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror."
If you couldn't tell from that very long sentence, To the Lighthouse is told in a stream of consciousness. Thoughts flow from one character to another, their perceptions and worries and joy. The prose moves very much like water.
Because of that, it's a slim book but packs a lot in it. The plot is that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey have a beach house for the summer (kind of like people do in Michigan) and they invite friends and colleagues to join them.
Mr. Ramsey is an impractical and thin-skinned academic, his wife an industrious matron of society. There's conceited Charles Tansley, who has a crush on Mrs. Ramsey and is dismissive of anyone who is not himself. Lily Briscoe admires Mrs. Ramsey, while also knowing that she doesn't want to give into the conventional domestic role that Mrs. Ramsey promotes, even as Mrs. Ramsey has sneaking glimpses of the unhappiness in her own marriage.
Tansley and Briscoe are at odds, of course. He thinks it's a woman's job to prop up the male ego, which is why they can't write or paint. Briscoe does not go along with that.
I love this description of the two sitting across from each other at a dinner party, from Briscoe's point of view:
"There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behooves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I would certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling."
"To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf; originally published 1927.
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