halfway through summer
More or less halfway. Summer is a precious commodity, and in July I start to feel it slipping away, time speeding up so that the days tick by as if I were on a train, each day one of the little towns you pass through, so small that they don't have a station. I used to take the train to school in Chicago, and I remember feeling sorry for those towns and the people who lived in them as if not having a station said something definitive about their lives and possibilities: I was a goony teenager.
I'm always hoping though that I'll turn out eventually to be a glass half-full person instead of the half-empty type I've been up to now. Half the summer left!
I'm reading Virginia Woolf again, the letters this time, which I haven't read so often as the diaries. I can barely
write a letter without putting it off for a month--how did she have time to write those countless volumes of letters and diaries, and still turn out 8 or so novels? (I also can't keep a diary--when I did I only wrote when I was feeling depressed or whiny; and I was never witty, as VW is at the drop of a hat.)
Here she talks (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) about writing letters with an audience in mind:
Do you think people (I'm thinking of Lytton and Walpole) do write letters to be published? I'm as vain as a cockatoo myself; but I dont think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the tea pot. Now, if I thought, Ottoline will put this letter in a box, I should at once apply the tip of my finger to the end of the spout.
And here she is on her new car:
I was going to say our car has come--silver and green, fluid fly wheel, Tickford hood... It glides with the smoothness of eel, with the speed of a swift, and the--isn't this a good blurb?--the power of a tigress who has just been reft of her young.
Did I say that I love Virginia Woolf?
I'm always hoping though that I'll turn out eventually to be a glass half-full person instead of the half-empty type I've been up to now. Half the summer left!
I'm reading Virginia Woolf again, the letters this time, which I haven't read so often as the diaries. I can barely
write a letter without putting it off for a month--how did she have time to write those countless volumes of letters and diaries, and still turn out 8 or so novels? (I also can't keep a diary--when I did I only wrote when I was feeling depressed or whiny; and I was never witty, as VW is at the drop of a hat.)Here she talks (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell) about writing letters with an audience in mind:
Do you think people (I'm thinking of Lytton and Walpole) do write letters to be published? I'm as vain as a cockatoo myself; but I dont think I do that. Because when one is writing a letter, the whole point is to rush ahead; and anything may come out of the spout of the tea pot. Now, if I thought, Ottoline will put this letter in a box, I should at once apply the tip of my finger to the end of the spout.
And here she is on her new car:
I was going to say our car has come--silver and green, fluid fly wheel, Tickford hood... It glides with the smoothness of eel, with the speed of a swift, and the--isn't this a good blurb?--the power of a tigress who has just been reft of her young.
Did I say that I love Virginia Woolf?
posted by mary grimm at 4:42 PM
5 Comments:
I have tried to keep a diary at various points in my life and have never been able to keep it up.
Yes, I have diary envy when I read VW's--because I've read them so many times, I sometimes think I can remember her life better than my unchronicled one.
i remember being born.
I remember standing in my crib, and I guess this disproves my theory, since I was not keeping a diary at the time.
I am with you on summer - it just seems to slip by so quickly, and it is so rich that we want to taste every bit! If only work would stop getting in the way. I hope that you greatly enjoy the writers' retreat.
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