Monday or Tuesday
From the book:Whatever hour you woke there was a door shunting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure - a ghostly couple. “Here we left it,” she said. And he added, “Oh, but here too!” “It’s upstairs,” she murmured. “And in the garden,” he whispered “Quietly,” they said, “or we shall wake them.” But it wasn’t that you woke us. Oh, no. “They’re looking for it; they’re drawing the curtain,” one might say, and so read on a page or two. “Now they’ve found it,” one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. “What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?” My hands were empty. “Perhaps it’s upstairs then?” The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
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I've been meaning to try out Virginia Woolf for awhile and and clicked on this file at Project Gutenburg tonight. Honestly, I didn't like it, but she definitely had an interesting way with words.
For example, my favorite sketch of the eight, “Blue & Green,” begins thus: “The pointed fingers of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green.” In many ways, more poetry than prose, without being truly either one.
Yet the moments of brilliant wordplay slip in and out, impossible to grasp onto and hold, because the next moment it blurs into an action, or into the next scene...almost in the same way as watching analog tv with static. Brief glimpses of something beautiful, but then a blur and a fuzz, leaving you wondering what was really supposed to have come next.
Most of all, what stood out to me in strong relief was the hopelessness of a soul wandering aimlessly through life. In one, a woman speaks of her friend's young daughter: “It's no good—not a bit of good,” I said. “Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in—and that is herself.”
The title essay, “Monday or Tuesday,” is a heartbreaking little blurb about the search for truth and coming back defeated: “Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring—(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)—for ever desiring—(the clock asservates in twelves distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)—for ever desiring truth.” And yet the seeker is doomed to failure.
