Perhaps when you saw the Virginia Woolf Writers’ Workshop, knowing my love of the classics, you imagined me as a long-time reader of Woolf. But the truth is, I only recently fell in love with Virginia Woolf. Before this summer, I had known her as an important writer, among the authors who used stream-of-consciousness and ushered in the modern novel, but I had only dipped in and out of the said novels, and while I found them brilliant every time, I never got around to finishing one. This summer, she called to me. I devoured novel after novel, reread the essays I knew, read the ones I didn’t know, and I was smitten. Now, I love every word she writes. No exceptions and adverbs are included.
I know tastes differ greatly—I like chocolate, you like vanilla—and I know nobody has to like who are thought to be the great writers or what’s called their great work. I also know that in our community some people have been reading Woolf longer than I have, some have been waiting to get started, and some have given her a try and reshelved the books after a few pages. Accepting all this, I want to share with you what I like in the works of Virginia Woolf, and I have to start here—I love the long sentences. The long sentence may be an acquired taste, but I invite you to go about it in a different way. Put aside the struggle to understand it and let the sentence carry you. It will take you to a place where beautiful language and profound thinking come together. Woolf’s long sentences flow effortlessly for so many lines without losing their rhythm. I love how she, in a single sentence, strings up metaphor after metaphor, alliteration after alliteration, rhyme after rhyme, and keeps it fresh. After spending time with Ginny—that’s what I call her between us—I caught myself thinking in a similar, fresher, and more vivid language even when I was walking to the grocery store, observing the cars and trees on my street, or putting a pan on the stove.But most of all, I love seeing Virginia Woolf’s mind at work. The sentence is a grammatical construction, and how it is put together is one of the keys to the writer’s mind. Often, when I start reading one of Woolf’s long sentences, I cannot guess where it will lead, and when I make it to the end, I secretly confess that I wouldn’t be able to write that sentence. This, for me, is humility and inspiration compact.
When I started reading Woolf’s fiction, it became very clear very quickly that her imagination is almost uncontrollable. The worlds she creates in her novels are rich, fantastic, and witty, always with a touch of humor. Through her sentences and scenes both, Woolf shows me the psychological structures that reside beneath the surface, and reading her, I learn to become aware of the influence of everyday objects and habits on myself, the complexity of my emotions, my trains of thoughts, and the triggers behind those thoughts and connections. Significantly, because she treats personal feelings, tastes, and opinions not only with equality and respect but with curiosity, philosophy, and poetry, she teaches me that my own worlds of thought and imagination are unique and, therefore valuable. Some of my class participants already shared with me or with our groups that reading Woolf felt like therapy. I know the feeling of reassurance of the value and meaning of our lives we get from her writing has to be part of that sentiment. Now, I knew what stream-of-consciousness was, but how did Virginia Woolf use it? What she gives me is not an incongruent collage of remembrances à la James Joyce—whom I also love and call Jimmy between us—which might alienate one from the writer’s mind and narrative, but a time slowed down, which enables me to go from thought to thought as the character thinks them. Here I must pause and admit that this is unnatural. We perceive the phenomenal world in a simultaneous and layered manner, and likewise think and feel, and only become aware of what we’re thinking or feeling when it’s lit up with the light of attention. We pick a single thought, sensation, or emotion among many others that occur all at once. Our knowledge, be it intellectual or emotional, has to be slowed down and separated into parts for us to translate it into language, to actually see how we get from point A to point B. I absolutely love this slowed-down time. When I read Virginia Woolf, I feel like I am in a dream world where I can finally match my thoughts in pace, and then I can match them in creative expression as Woolf starts to paint and sing them, with metaphors, alliterations, rhyme, and rhythm. The slowed-down time and the revelations that come in its embrace bring me closer to understanding the power of art. Jonah Lehrer writes, “When we listen to music, we are moved by an abstraction. We feel, but we don't know why.” In Virginia Woolf’s writing, time is slowed down enough for me to witness some of that sound in the making. I come close to knowing why I feel what I feel. (I also think allowing myself to vacation in her slowed-down time land is an antidote to the never-ending busy-ness of the 21st century—perhaps I too feel disconcerted with my era as Baudelaire complained about the 19th century and Woolf observed in the 20th century, but am too distracted by my phone to notice it!)
Reading Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction brings me close to a brilliant mind who takes in the whole picture of her time with its problems and developments—class, sexism, war, construction, technology—and contemplates it as an artist. In my comparably luxurious and privileged life, being born after the world wars, after the disposable camera, the artificial heart, and the space shuttle were invented, and after women were given rights to money and education in Turkey, I never worried about the place of art in society, nor did I spare a thought on the type of art I should create so that it is relevant to my time and its needs. Woolf’s essays made me realize how selfish and small I was, and even if I may not be Woolf the historian, Woolf the sociologist, Woolf the feminist, Woolf the pacifist all at once, I want to be Woolf the philosopher who brings together the interior and the exterior. It is impossible not to see and not to be inspired by her two sides, academic and artistic, influence one another, and make her write more arresting essays and more innovative novels. I know reading Virginia Woolf will open my imagination in ways I didn’t think possible before, and I sure hope this will prove to be correct for my class participants in the Virginia Woolf Workshops. She has already increased my sensitivity to things inside and outside, moved nearer my inner consciousness and lived experience of the world, and given me the vocabulary to think about silent or dismissed aspects of my life, past and present, that I didn’t know how to express before. I expect, over time, she will continue to do so, so that eventually, she will also give me the chance to see how, through my thoughts and imagination, I construct and perform the self I know to be me and most importantly, where I can take this self and this understanding. I am a bit scared but very excited to start teaching Virginia Woolf. I know her writing will show us the intimate workings of the mind and inspire us as readers and writers. I know the force of her intellect and imagination will inspire us to find the connections between ideas and literary forms, and make us define what writing is for us. And I know her literary explorations, daring and innovative, will push us to think about where our own writing can take us in our own paths, in our own futures.
Harvard University has digitized Virginia Woolf's Monk's House photograph album. You may see all of the photographs here: https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:17948758$1i
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