My friend was a consummate English major and so had read Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and might well have based his pithy apothegm on this book on the power of artifice, though the Guns N’ Roses album Use Your Illusion is a more likely source. In this novel, Woolf in her famous “Time Passes” chapter describes how time inevitably destroys all human order: houses, histories, husbands, children. Just before this chapter is a scene in which several of Mrs. Ramsay’s children and the guests she and Mr. Ramsay have invited to their summer home in the Hebrides all return from a satisfying evening by the seaside. Entering the house, “smoothly brushing the walls, they passed on musingly as if asking the red and yellow roses on the wallpaper whether they would fade, and questioning (gently, for there was time at their disposal) the torn letters in the wastepaper basket, the flowers, the books, all of which were now open to them and asking, Were they allies? Were they enemies? How long would they endure?”
This brief meditation on endurance leads into one of the most brutal and moving ten or so pages in literature, in the course of which we watch the Scottish weather attack relentlessly and rapidly deteriorate the house, while tragedy ravages the former inhabitants, worlds away, each death rendered by Woolf, shockingly, within brackets, suggesting the insignificance of these lives we’ve come to value so highly in the book’s opening one-hundred-odd pages. Andrew, one of the Ramsay children, is blown up by a shell in the First World War. Prue, another, dies in childbirth. Most disturbingly, Mrs. Ramsay, into whose complex, glittering, compassionate, vulnerable, insecure, beauty-loving consciousness we have been, paragraph by lyrical paragraph, streamed, dies suddenly one night, leaving her husband “stumbling along a passage one dark morning,” his arms stretched out, but remaining “empty.”
Woolf’s novel wails with such startlingly sorrowful moments, when the inhuman and gargantuan gales of time devastate all that is significant to us, all that we love. The book asserts over and over again that the world minus human awareness is meaningless, stupid. The sea, for instance, “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat[s] the measure of life, [makes] one think [as it does in this case the still-living Mrs. Ramsay] of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea,” and warns that each day slips “past in one quick doing after another,” “that it [is] all ephemeral as a rainbow.” To the woman desperate to love her life—her family, her home, her beauty—the ocean thunders horrifically, drowning her heart’s tiny beats.
How to counter the entropy? Create brief orders that seem to calm the heartless groan. Only seconds before Mrs. Ramsay falls into her terrible reverie, the distant murmur of men’s voices—they are likely talking philosophy—and the “taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes,” and “the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, ‘How’s that? How’s that?’ of the children playing cricket”: these sounds intermingle with the surf’s gratings to compose “a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts,” a beat that “consolingly” repeats, morphs, in her ears, to “the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you—I am your support.’”
The ear, our body’s innate artist, wields the hammer, tip-taps the anvil, turns, without trying, the monotonous slammings of water and sand into sweet rockabyes. Fairly flat art. Anyone can do it.
A more powerful structuring: the domestic order, not “highly conscious” but forceful, later established by Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast, the cleaning ladies who, though old and stiff, scrub and organize the Ramsays’ home on the Isle of Skye, after it has descended into filth and disrepair, ravaged by the “fertility, the insensibility of nature.”
But almost anyone can of course accomplish such housework if she has moderate vim and fortitude. There are yet higher orders, if “higher” here means heightened possibility, complexity, ability to transform not buildings without but those inner architectures, call them emotions, thoughts, imaginings, temperaments. Here think of the game of cricket, blind motion subdued by rules, themselves made exciting and graceful by the playing. Who knows who will win, what records might be set, what efforts, Herculean and blithe, might rise into beauty and remain as jewels in our running-down hearts? Brood also on the conversation, sound waves rounded and whistled and stopped and released into semantics, grammar, syntax, rhetoric, forms admitting an almost infinite variety of expression and communication.
Still other orders, necessitating even more skill and scope: the cooking of the famous boeuf en daube, the main dish of a dinner party on Skye, presided nervously over by the consummate hostess Mrs. Ramsay, who, until the platter of tender, warm beef arrives, frets over the awkward silences, the forced talk, the whole affair teetering on failure, but then finds herself gathered into ecstasy when the sustenance arrives in the candlelight perfectly executed, holding everyone’s expectation and delight, everyone now unified in his or her crepuscular beauty—the candles make all faces interesting—and in her or his appreciation of the beautiful dish, everyone drawn into an abrupt harmony, as intricate and compelling as a group dance.
Cooking is an art, but an ephemeral one, constrained to raw flesh and fruits rushing toward rot, to appetites that come and go, to heartburn and gas, to fire that will not burn forever. Fine art, poetry or musical composition or painting, is different. It requires more talent than does cooking, or carpentry, because it, the art, needs, in ways that more expedient crafts do not, intelligence, imagination, empathy, insight, courage, weirdness, nonconformity, freedom, as well as extremely refined, and often well-trained, technical prowess.
In the novel, Lily Briscoe, a summer visitor to the Ramsay island home, exemplifies the force of fine art, even though she is far from a brilliant and accomplished painter. An amateur, she struggles over the course of the book to paint Mrs. Ramsay reading to her son James, as she saw them one afternoon through the cottage window, from her vantage point outside on the lawn. For her, this moment stands out from others, is especially luminous, evocative, dense, significant.
It is such a memory as another one she possesses, of playing on the beach with the other visitors while Mrs. Ramsay sits by and watches. This recollection, a “moment of friendship and liking,” has stayed in her mind, “affecting [her] almost like a work of art.” Such moments as these are the “little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark” that give life its meaning, intensity, textures. They inspire one to say, “Life stand still here,” in hopes of “making of the moment something permanent.”
These “moments of being,” Woolf called them elsewhere, assure us that “in the midst of chaos there [is] shape,” that this “eternal passing and flowing” can sometimes be “struck into stability.” To render such moments artistically is a high and useful calling, preserving these refulgent instances in enduring, engrossing form. This is Lily’s task, to elevate the afternoon Mrs. Ramsay read to James into a long-lasting structure, there for her to behold and cherish and gain vivification from for decades. This is what she achieves, at novel’s end finishing her painting, on which she has worked off and on for over ten years—completing the picture and, upon “laying down her brush in extreme fatigue,” concluding: “I have had my vision.”
Amateur paintings, photography, poems and such: all these intone to certain moments, Be still, and archive them for ongoing gazing and delight, providing a feeling to those scrapbooking or looking or whatnot that there are meaningful periods, periods more real than others—more fascinating, more precious, more vital—and that these durations are about as real as it gets. What, then, of the greatest artists, the Woolfs and the Beethovens and the Turners?
To describe what constitutes the greatest art is impossible, and only an idiot tries to do it with rigor. Hint, gist, suggestion are best, and the assumption that we all, if it came down to it, would agree that the works of Virginia Woolf, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Joseph Turner share these glories: stillness and permanence—an ocean-cliff calm and lastingness; quick darts of thought and emotion, as unpredictable as silvery eels; giant scope, solving mysteries or revealing the unsolvable, from the depths of the darkest fin to the star-high firmament; complexity, depicting life’s bewilderingly intricate anatomies; and simplicity, in the midst of the crazed paradoxes, reminding us that this is it, now, here, always, and nothing you can do about it, and everything.