09 February 2009
♥ a rather severe case of writers' block
As much as I despise Mrs. Dalloway, I'm beginning to understand how Virginia Woolf felt until she thought of that first, perfect sentence: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." I have so much to say, but I can't think of any way to put it all into words. It makes such perfect sense in my head, where my thoughts pitch little tents and camp out for days at a time, until they finally find their way out of the woods. But when I try to write it down, everything feels meaningless, inarticulate. Nothing seems significant or even worth saying at all, and I feel like I'm just vomiting all over the page: who wants to read my literary vomit?
I hope my contemporary lit teacher doesn't mind too much, because she's about to receive a thousand-word paper that seems an insult to Woolf for all its hollowness and (unintended) insincerity.
I hate to come off as a morose intellectual, but there's something about Woolf's notion of capturing the feelings we experience in a single moment of our lives, the idea that we might read something and think, Yes, that's exactly it, that I find so heartbreakingly captivating. I wish I could be a writer. I wish I could write down all these things I keep thinking; I wish I could make something so beautiful and tragically, poetically real that it would change someone's life, the way The Hours has changed mine.
"There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."
2/09/2009
