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Let's Dalloway The Day Away.

Since I can't seem to find a means to directly comment on my friend's post (stupid tumblr), I figured I'd make a blog post out of my response. This is my favorite paragraph of English prose in all of English literature, the 5th paragraph from Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway:
For having lived in Westminster -- how many years now? over twenty,-- one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved on the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest of frumps, the most dejected of miseries (drink their downfall) do same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, the motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was she loved; life; London; this moment of June.
I think this highly relevant to my friend's post; here is someone doing exactly as my friend suggests: "Our purpose is to try to understand and find beauty in the world around us, each other, and ourselves because we’re the only beings that can, and that is a cosmic gift."

ALSO: for those still reading: a bit of trivia, a random factoid: there are but two tattoos I courd ever see myself getting: an obscure mark of punctuation (which I'll save for another post) and those last four words from that paragraph: "this moment of June".
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Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 16, 2010 at 6:45 AM

    I love that paragraph, and after reading it, those 4 words have a very special meaning, her entire emotional state dissolved into it!

    -Adrian (you will know me)

    ReplyDelete

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