Learning to cross a pool of thought with the lighthouse
She did not want to wake up, get up. Her thoughts were thick, light, like cotton balls gently packed between her ears to cushion her sleeping mind. Every now and then, a cotton ball would poof out of one ear or the other and fall, leaf-like, onto her pillow, only to disappear into the downy feather insides. The lazy light wafting through her closed and shaded window tinged the silver-grey room with the outside. She resented the intrusion, and turned over, disturbing the cotton balls and compacting them unintentionally. They began to compress with each turn, each toss, and the pressure of her thoughts became such that they liquefied and swirled within her skull. She felt that, soon, they’d pour right out of her mind and be lost forever. But she felt no loss.
For some time now, she’d been struggling with a sense of boredom, of frustration with the mundane. Not boredom directed at any one thing in particular, but rather with everything. She wanted something exciting, something to make her mind run smoothly instead of softly. When awake, her world consisted of a rhythm without change, without discernable tempo. Her bed, her sleep, her dreams kept the boredom at bay, so she never wanted to wake up. Get up. Nevertheless, the day called to her, reached out with its cloudy fingers and patted her on the cheek, told her it was time to begin.
She woke up, got up.
There were no expeditions that day, no bright lights or green lawns awaiting her excitement, smiles, or bare footfalls. That day required little of her, though her frustration made every task into a torture. Why, she thought, must there be no water in a city? The only beat around me is the stamping of millions of feet, the only pulse that of millions of hearts. Even the trees here pulse with human thought, she quietly grumbled. There was no quiet for her, no simplicity.
Her feet hit the grey carpet floor, the cotton ball liquid evaporated, the frustration set in around her neck in a silver chain. Today, she would dip her feet in a private stream; she’d jump into a world other than her own.
“Mrs. Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely…braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating…” (Woolf, 37).
Her toes tingled with a strange sensation, the clear liquid smoothing over the roughness that nudity had brought to them. As she watched them wriggle about, occasionally bumping into a pebble or being crawled over by a crawfish, she wondered about the green-grey sky outside, the passing clouds, the sun hidden elsewhere, realized she had to walk somewhere. Her feet reluctantly slipped away from the tiny minnows and eddies and into red-white Converse. They walked her to class, where she sat and wondered at her professor.
There seemed to be a gap, in her opinion, between the words she thought, the words she said, and the words the professor repeated back at her as though they were her own. They never really matched up, no matter the latter tried to pair them. Why was that? she wondered. Why couldn’t she leave her words alone, accept them as they were and acknowledge there might be some merit in her ideas?
A small voice, perhaps arising from her toes, perhaps from the tips of her ears, whispered that, maybe, the professor believes your ideas are the words she repeats back at you. She shook her head, throwing the thought away like any other used cotton ball – saturated as it was with thought. Maybe you’re not being clear enough; another cotton ball was thrown away. The professor’s voice interrupted her as she chucked it into the trash.
“That is to say…”
“All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now” (Woolf, 69).
No, that isn’t to say, she thought bitterly. Silence. Why do no professors understand that thought requires silence? she grumbled, irritated. There was a child squirming in her chest, its little arms waving about in irritation and knocking years down off internal shelves, shattering them with each impetuous flail of its baby fat. By the end of class, a five-year-old sat in the chair, sulking and silent.
The professor stood and lectured to the class, her thoughts far away in a room where a bookshelf sat, overburdened with books and photos. It was the only cluttered part of her apartment – well, that and the desk, but that couldn’t be helped. It simply could not. All the work, all the tasks to be done… Why were the students so quiet today? The frustration was coming off them in waves, the anxiety tapped into the ground by jumping feet and into desks by nervous fingers. The young woman watched as, minute by minute, each student struggled to phrase even the simplest ideas. It must be stress, she thought, and in her bountiful generosity decided to pose them a simple question. Yet, the wall of silence her words ran into knocked them straight to the ground, prostrate, and within moments they were trying to crawl back to her, up her legs and into her thoughts. Why were they so quiet?
The class ended, to the relief of everyone, she thought. Her red-and-white feet rippled down the stairs as, beside her, a question mark hopped down and matched her pace exactly. He seemed to grow in size and density with each step, snowballing into a figure almost humanoid, until she realized it was a human. A stranger. A question mark. Her consciousness wrapped around him, without her eyes ever turning to him, feeling out whether or not he was familiar, testing and imagining what his thoughts and face could be. Just as she thought, perhaps, she should glance over and smile, her feet took her through wood-and-glass doors, and the question mark disappeared. She sighed, frustrated once more by the boredom of every day - every moment - in the seemingly never-ending repetition of quotidian life, and she walked.
She arrived at her door. There was more work to be done, more pressing - and boring - but she chose to forget. Her toes wiggled at her gleefully, excited to slip out of the shoes and into the water once more. Maybe she’d go in up to her knees this time.
“…for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility…” (Woolf, 73).
She felt she’d found something – a pearl, a conch, a sea star – that only a few had seen before her. Something precious, something personal – a feeling or idea that she only had or felt every few years. The idea, the sentiment was hers. She grasped it, desperately, furtively, but before she could fully appreciate it the world called her back. She surfaced, gasping for air, realizing she could only swim for so long, only hold her breath for so long. A professor – a different one – lectured before her. Beside her, another girl wrote an email: “Hi Lydia!” She took a deep breath. The professor’s words tumbled over her head, beat at her ears, disrupted her peace: “That’s for later, right now…” Her frustration rose within her, a wave of fluid anger and resentment turned into self-absorbing, all-consuming irritation. “Hi Lydia!” The feeling was lost, it slipped out from her tightly clenched fingers, and an overwhelming sense of mourning crashed over her. She was suddenly too tired to feel angry, or bored, or frustrated. She was tired, and confusion overflowed her consciousness.
She was in school, after all, wasn’t she? She ought to care about these things, shouldn’t she? But all she wanted, all she needed, was to grab that understanding, that pearl…
“…giving herself the little shake that one gives a watch that has stopped, the old familiar pulse began beating, as the watch began ticking—one, two three, one, two, three. And so on and so on, she repeated, listening to it, sheltering and fostering the still feeble pulse as one might guard a weak flame with a newspaper” (Woolf, 83).
She sat, curled up by a window, feeling the light fade more than realizing it was late, as she swam back to shore, through waves of words and seas of thoughts. She now knew she had been drowning, her arms and legs held down by over-saturated cotton-balls, self-imposed and self-propagated. She now knew.
“…she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another…” (Woolf, 119).
She had been floundering, and then she had seen the lighthouse and, like many a terrified sailor, been drawn in by its welcoming yellow arm to somewhere safe, to something new, to someone entertaining.