I was struck by the fluctuating feelings that many of the characters have for one another. A good portion of the stream of consciousness seems to be devoted to the internal processing of one characters feelings for another, e.g. Mrs. Ramsay and Charles Tansley; Mrs. Ramsay towards Mr Ramsay; James towards his parents; Lily Briscoe towards Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The least melancholy, most comfortable moments for me as a reader were when a character's feelings were the most definite.
Despite her condescension towards Lily, Mrs. Ramsay noticed and enjoyed Lily's independence: "Lily's picture! Mrs. Ramsay smiled. With her little Chinese eyes and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it; so, remembering her promise, she bent her head."
William Bankes and Lily have an easy, steady relationship and seem to know how they feel about one another.
Mr. Ramsay seems to make everyone uncomfortable...including me.
Mr. Carmichael seemed to be the only character who didn't really like Mrs. Ramsay. His resulting manner made Mrs. Ramsay uncomfortable and she was perpetually seeking to bridge the gap between them.
The only time when I remember Mr. Ramsay being made uncomfortable by Mrs. Ramsay is when he sees her lost in her own thoughts, unavailable to him: "She was aloof from him now in her beauty, in her sadness. He would let her be, and he passed her without a word, though it hurt him that she should look so distant, and he could not reach her, he could do nothing to help her. And again he would have passed her without a word had she not, at that very moment, given him of her own free will what she knew he would never ask, and called to him and taken the green shawl off the picture frame and gone to him. For he wished, she knew, to protect her." "He did not like to see her look so sad, he said. Only wool gathering, she protested, flushing a little. They both felt uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back. She had been reading fairy tales to James, she said. No, they could not share that; they could not say that."
This same neediness of his presents itself to Lily towards the end of the book but her reaction is so different from Mrs. Ramsay's that the tension increases between them as he refuses to ask directly for what he needs from her and she refuses to give it though she is aware of it. She resents his neediness. And like James, any negative feelings Lily has about Mrs. Ramsay seem to relate to Mrs. Ramsay's surrender to Mr. Ramsay's spoken and unspoken demands. "All Lily wished was that this enormous flood of grief, this insatiable hunger for sympathy, this demand that she should surrender herself up to him entirely, and even so he had sorrows enough to keep her supplied forever, should leave her, should be diverted (she kept looking at the house, hoping for an interruption) before it swept her down in its flow."
They each seem to struggle so much with their connections to others and their isolation from one another. Lily is unable to offer Mr. Ramsay what he seeks and instead talks to him of his boots. "They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots. Her heart warmed to him." She has made a connection with him that didn't require extreme sacrifice on her part and she is comfortable for a moment.
After Mr. Ramsay and the children leave to go to the lighthouse, Lily wants to speak with Mr. Carmichael, to connect, but she cannot. "She wanted to go straight up to him and say "Mr. Carmichael!" Then he would look up benevolently as always, from his smoky vague green eyes. But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. "About life, about death, about Mrs. Ramsay" - no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark."
Then a passage follows in which Lily contemplates the inadequacy of language to express one's inner self. The passage seems similar to me to the earlier passages related to Lily's struggle to paint exactly what she envisions in her mind. Much of the book seems to tackle this struggle to make inner thoughts into outward expressions.
She looks pretty harmless. I think I've only ever read A Room of One's Own. I am up for trying To The Lighthouse. Besides, how could I pass up reading"one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time,” a book considered to be "one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century?!" I can't. To The Lighthouse!
To quote the Jungle Book vultures: "I don't know; What do you want to do?" I would be happy to start a new book. But it sounded like Never Let Me Go had been on your reading list for a bit and I don't want to skip over your pick. How about this: we'll move on with Natalie's pick and but whenever you do read it, we can circle back and talk about it then? What do you two think?
