slow-burn reading
Word Blurbs Vol. II: The Waves by Virginia Woolf
It’s taken me almost a year to reach the final page of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves:
276 days for 228 pages.
I bought my copy last fall, already used, and since then, it has only worn even more. The front-cover image has frayed at the edges, torn soft to reveal a white, sea foam colored underside.
My edition has been everywhere I have: Paris and Marrakech, Lisbon and London, Andalusia and Salvador, Bahia. On planes and trains and balconies and beaches and cafes, the book has been folded and rolled over itself, its creased pages etched into with pencil and blue pen—alternating depending on which one I have on hand. Pressed into firmly, urgently, and thoughtfully with engravings that are at times steady and otherwise squiggly. They have been wet and sun-dried, salted with ocean-water and seasoned with the tobacco-weed crumbs at the bottom of my purse.
It’s been months since I promised my brother that I would lend him my copy when I was done, and even longer since I told him I had started to read it.
The person I have become in that time is one who has become shameless about how long I’ve been carrying it around, wading through the words at my own pace. On some days, I take it with me, and even out of my bag, and end up not even reading a single page.
I have realized how necessary it has been: to pick it up, put it back down again. Repeat across the weeks and months. I’ve absolved myself, I think, of the guilt I tend to get stuck in when I can’t read fluidly; when I am not optimizing as I should; not impressing myself with my own intellect.
This is not the kind of book you can reduce to habit or entertainment. There were many things in this novel that I needed to be patient with: six characters and the landscape of their inner lives as they age, moving across inner and outer revelations, taken through each stage of their life from adolescence onward and well into old age.
I owed the story the same patience it showed its characters. Time—minutes of intimacy. Not just to check it off my reading list for a chip on my shoulder and a finished edition on my shelf, but to sit with the words and give them my considered attention.
Likewise, I needed lapses—natural breaks that came from scheduling conflicts or laziness, leading to weeks where I would put the book down.
I can see it now: how they eventually amounted to these moments of serendipitous encounter, where I would pick up on the page I left off on, and find the themes to speak directly to the circumstances of my life at a given time.
I needed to pace my reading so that I could integrate change on my own scale, relative to the my own growing up—reaching intuitively for the baby-blue paperback like a mirror and sighing with relief when I would read something that made me realize that all is aligned; that if I am patient, I will always have time.
What I have written below is a cento poem: what is essentially a Rorschach test, shaped from someone else’s sentences.
I’ve taken all the circled words and phrases I have from my copy of The Waves, maintaining the annotations style I have for half a decade, and arranged them into poems.
My method was outlined in depth when I published Volume I of these poems, leafing through my Lispector copies and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. At the time, I thought I invented it, going so far as to allude to Deleuzian assemblage. I even gave them their own name:
The singular instances of resonance, once circled and compiled, come together to reveal an unconscious pattern of my perception…
I call them ‘Word Blurbs’
Still, my engagement with this literary tradition is innovative on the grounds of my own human instinct: what enticed me to see myself in someone else’s words, and venture to configure them in my own arrangement.
What is rumored to be a fragmented self portrait of Woolf herself will be pieced together, here, influenced by my own selections— dually reflective of myself and the author within the world of this work, which we inhabit together.
A thin dream steeped in pleasure bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. Scenes of tenderness, islands of light, amulets against disaster. My absurd and violent passion: the need I have to offer my being. Strange oscillations and vibrations of sympathy. Something very important, yet remote: natural happiness, susceptibility to atmosphere. The mystic sense of completion; The incomprehensible nature of this our life. Let us be trivial, Let us be intimate. Nothing entire, the wild gusts of life. The sun falls sheer: the usual doubt, the islands of cloud. The terrible pounce of memory: conscious of companionship, substantial breath, the uselessness of human exertion. Fatal hesitancy —what death has done to my world. The unreal world, stronger than love and more subterranean. One recovers belief, aware of our ephemeral passage: the delicious jostle of confusion. Addressing what is abstract liberates understanding. The atoms of my attention flung with purpose, set against the whirling abysses of infinite space, pierced with arrows of sensation. My fresh, my unknown name: the desire which loaded behind my lips. The empty, expectant rooms. A thousand capacities spring up in me! All the insanity of personal existence! Infinite sensibility! Measureless abundance here in my serene head: opal, blue, rose, those resonances and lovely echoes. A new day breaks open, the eternal renewal; the kind of beauty which defends itself. An amorous light filled with lingering sensations. Sensitive, percipient, the majestic march of day. Enormous peace, half bitter, half sweet: the pitch of absurdity. Another sip of the divine specific —boundless curiosity about human destiny. I am rooted, but I flow. Immeasurably receptive, holding everything. Strangely, persuasively, some ponderous, maternal, majestic animal.
Best paper i wrote in undergrad was in this book. I haven’t read this in a long time.. this has inspired me to go back and revisit it.