Hey Tumblr, I am coming back for a bit of sanity and the chance of a place to express myself in a form I can’t find anywhere else. I’ve had a week filled with far too much reflection on mortality for which I blame the literature course I’m teaching (I know, First World problems). Death didn’t seem quite so visceral back when I was studying literature in my immortal early 20s, but now - in my reflective early 30s - it’s a kinda pain in the ass; the spaceship is coming for me and there’s no way to stop it. I just hope by the time it arrives I’ve done everything I meant to (with the deepest consciousness possible), loved everyone I can and worried only about the things that really matter: family, friendship and fulfillment.
Anyway, the reason I’m feeling so morbid is because the writers I’m reading right now are all very concerned with the concept of death and how we deal with it. That’s what life is I suppose - facing death. Check out this a quote from Virginia Woolf’s, The Waves, as an example. I read this book a couple of years ago and found it indulgent and pretentious, it still is a little bit but it’s also very moving and poetic. Woolf’s words (now spoken from the grave) made me confront the rip tidal futility of my life, for sure.
‘Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures? Better burn one’s life out like Louis, desiring perfection; or like Rhoda leave us, flying past us to the desert; or choose one out of millions and only one like Neville; better be like Susan and love and hate the heat of the sun or the frostbitten grass; or be like Jinny, honest, an animal. All had their rapture; their common feeling with death; something that stood them in stead. Thus I visited each of my friends in turn, trying, with fumbling fingers, to prise open their locked caskets, I went from one to the other holding my sorrow - no, not my sorrow but the incomprehensible nature of this our life - for their inspection. Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends, I to my own heart, I seek among phrases and fragments something unbroken - I to whom there is not beauty enough in moon or tree; to whom the touch of one person with another is all, yet who cannot grasp even that, who am so imperfect, so weak, so unspeakably lonely. (p.150-1)
