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...