SONJA DÖNNECKE

NIGHT AFTER NIGHT, summer and winter, the torment of storms … held their court without interference. Listening … from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the wind and waves disported themselves like the enormous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight … in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself …

Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw … a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened suddenly, and softly, in the evening.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse, 1927