Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time

Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge is one of the great essays on alcoholism, second only to The Shining. And even if you’re brain is dry, you should run to see the elegant edition of Hardy’s classic on display in Virginia Woolf: The Flight of Time, in its last precious few days at the Carrere Gallery in the Forbes Building on lower Fifth Avenue. Here’s a brief note, exhibited in the show, which V.W. wrote to Hardy’s widow. “I was very much disappointed not to come to your lunch the other day. I had been dining out the night before and fainted owing to the heat. So that it seemed unwise to go out again the next day. Indeed I stayed in bed. But I am quite well again now and hope very much I may see you later.” Contrast this to what V.W. wrote to her sister Vanessa Bell decades later, on 3/28/41, the day she took her life, by walking into the sea. “I feel that I have gone too far to come back again. I am certain now that I am going mad again. It’s just as it was the first time. I am always hearing voices and I know I shan’t get over it now.” And here is what Virginia’s beloved Vita Sackville-West would write in the manuscript of a poem, which appears in the exhibit, “Frugal, austere, fancy, proud/Rich in her contradictions, rich I love/Some say, she lived in an unreal world…she now has gone/Into the prouder world of immortality.” And now back to Hardy’s Mayor who was also riven by creative and self-destructive urges. Along with letters, memorabilia (like Woolf’s 1923 passport) and commentary, this gem of a show, comprised of works collected by William B. Beekman, includes Hogarth Press editions of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, whose extraordinary post-Impressionist covers, show the influence of her lover Roger Fry, who had written extensively on Cezanne and Van Gogh.  Some creative publisher must bring these wonderful non-sequiturs back from the dead.

In Defense of Hesitation

So you’ve waited and waited and waited, putting off the delicious consummation of your desires, precisely because you wanted something to look forward to. Isn’t that the predicament that Kierkegaard lays out so eloquently in Diary of a Seducer, in which dispossession becomes nine tenths of the law? Zen, in both its serious and watered-down forms, teaches us to live in the now, emphasizing that we only have today, to the extent that the past is over and the future is yet to be. But who wants to live this way? Is the reality of Paris and all the things associated with it, as delineated, say, by Henry Miller in Quiet Days in Clichy, really that arresting? What is better: great sex, a great meal, a great passion, or the imagination of it? Yes, if we wait too long the woman with the enchanting cleavage sitting one carrel over in the stacks of the library is going to vanish, and you will probably never see her again. But let’s hypothesize that you get lucky, and you lock eyes with a beauty reminiscent of Mariangela Melato in Swept Away. That movie was  released in l974, before the onset of the AIDS epidemic, and in homage to those carefree times, what if you suggest a fling in the Thomas Hardy section, right next to Tess? You make your own bargain with Mephistopheles, choosing gratification with little regard for the consequences. Lo and behold, it’s not a disease you end up with, but the infection of obsession. You have opened Pandora’s box and made yourself vulnerable. Particularly if the sex is good, you will want more. You are now powerless, where before you were at no one’s mercy, living in a world of blissful anticipation. The Buddhists have one other thing right: desire is the beginning of suffering.