the gravel IS the place for me

So, this past weekend I have been working on two presentations. Of course, with me, I over work things and so I spent 40 hours in three days working on these projects. Saturday, I worked from 8a to 2a with a three hour break to see Blood Wedding at BYU. Anyway, I learned a lot about Joan Tower, Ruth Crawford-Seeger and Virginia Woolf. When I was choosing a reading example from A Room of One's Own for my Masterpieces of English Literature class presentation, I really admired what she is saying in this work. At first, I was kinda upset that the selection we were assigned to read came from a series of essays based on lectures, but then I realized that though it is not Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse it is still a masterpiece. The things she says are just so profound and deep. :) This is why I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf. I also had to incorporate the movie The Hours into the presentation. This is just a remarkable movie with an astounding message. I am showing the beginning where Woolf kills herself, which, btw I learned, is actually how she killed herself by putting stones in her pocket and walking into the river, and the letter she writes in the clip is exactly what she wrote to her husband Leonard. Such a profound movie about decisions and life itself. With a life full of death, sexual abuse and mental instability, Virginia Woolf was able to write some pretty amazing things. Here is the section I chose from A Room of One's Own. It is long, but it is great:

“It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; that was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done [….]

“Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls of roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind—Saint Chares, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essay are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, the lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which eaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray's Esmond is also preserved. The critics often say with its imitation of the eighteenth-century style was natural to Thackeray—a fact that one might prove by looking at the manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the Library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

"That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? […]”

Tata for now. Go see the movie The Hours. It is so great.

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."