Tag: woolf notes

Simone Weil from Gravity and Grace

I can easily imagine that [God] loves that perspective of creation that
can only be seen from the point where I am. But I act as a screen.

I must withdraw so that he might see it.

I must withdraw so that God might enter into contact with the
beings whom chance places in my path and so that he might love me.
My presence is indiscreet, as though I found myself between two lov-
ers or two friends. I am not the maiden who awaits her betrothed but
the unwelcome third who is with the two lovers and who ought to go
away so that they can really be together.

If I only knew how to disappear, there would be a perfect union of
love between God and the earth I tread, the sea I hear …

That I might disappear so that those things that I see may become
perfectly beautiful from the fact that they are no longer things that I
see.

I do not in the least wish that this created world should no longer
be perceptible, but that it should no longer be me to whom it is per-
ceptible. To me it cannot tell its secret which is too high. That I might
leave, then the creator and the creature will exchange their secrets.

To see a landscape as it is when I am not there …

Writing is precisely working (in) the in-between, inspecting the process of the same and of the other…not fixed in sequences of struggle and expulsion…but infinitely dynamized by an incessent process of exchange from one subject to another… a multiple and inexhaustible course with millions of encounters and transformations of the same into the other and into the in-between, from which woman takes her forms (and man, in his turn)

Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa 

from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse

How could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (She was looking at the drawing-room steps; they looked extraordinarily empty.) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. The physical sensations that went with the bare look of the steps had become suddenly extremely unpleasant. To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain [ … ] Oh, Mrs. Ramsay! she called out silently, to that essence which sat by the boat, that abstract one made of her, that woman in grey, as if to abuse her for having gone, and then having gone, come back again. [ … ] Suddenly, the empty drawing-room steps, the frill of the chair inside, the puppy tumbling on the terrace, the whole wave and whisper of the garden became like curves and arabesques flourishing round a center of complete emptiness.