Jordan’s Reviews > To the Lighthouse > Status Update

“DIstance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up it, she felt, they were gone forever, they had become part of the nature of things.”

“Moreover, softened and acquiescent, the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak about her, veiled her eyes, averted her head, and among passing shadows and flights of small rain seemed to have taken upon her a knowledge of the sorrows of mankind.”

Now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light…into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things waver and vanished, waterily.

“To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. …it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”