More on "To the Lighthouse"

On 10/22/11 I wrote about listening to “To the Lighthouse” on CD, and how listening to it read made the meaning of the words, and the weight of their sounds, so tangible. I have now finished the novel, and just want to add here that the luminosity of the writing, the insights into the characters’ consciousnesses, and the awareness and capture of the hundreds of shifts of emotions people go through every day, are but a few of the awe-inspiring qualities of Woolf’s writing. For just one example, here is a description of Lily Briscoe’s thoughts as she paints at the Ramsay’s house on the Isle of Skye: “One wanted, she thought…to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” How beautifully Woolf encapsulates the constant alternating of our consciousnesses between the quotidian and the sublime.