Virginia Woolf Flashcards
Virginia Woolf: The Emergent Self
from ‘Proust Was A Neuroscientist’ by John Lehrer
‘Woolf’s revelation was that we emerge from our own fleeting interpretations of the world… As Woolf wrote in her unfinished memoir, “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”’
‘we are composed of ever-changing impressions that are held together by the thin veneer of identity.’
“it is no use trying to sum people up”- Jacob’s Room
Clarissa understands that her mind has an ‘invisible centre’
“That was her self — pointed; dartlike; definite. That was her self when some effort, some call on her to be her self”
T.S. Eltiot: ‘The poet has, not a ‘personality to express, but i particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality’
Woolf in Diary: we are ‘splinted and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate monolithic, consistent wholes.’
Distinct minds in left and right hemisphere in conflict: ‘Such was the complexity of things…to feel violently two opposite things at the same time; that’s what you feel, was one; that’s what i feel, was the other, and then they fought together in her mind, as now.’ Lily- To The Lighthouse.
Woolf understood that ‘the self emerges via acts of attention’. thus ‘we invent ourselves out of our own sensations’. For example, Mrs Ramsey staring at the fruit bowl at dinner leads to the emergence of the self : \Beneath it is all dark…But now and then we rise to the surface and that is what you see…”
