Monday or Tuesday

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.