To The Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

the ships, and the ships looked as if they were conscious of the

  cliffs, as if they signalled to each other some message of their own.

  For sometimes quite close to the shore, the Lighthouse looked this

  morning in the haze an enormous distance away.

  "Where are they now?" Lily thought, looking out to sea. Where was he,

  that very old man who had gone past her silently, holding a brown paper

  parcel under his arm? The boat was in the middle of the bay.

  8

  They don't feel a thing there, Cam thought, looking at the shore,

  which, rising and falling, became steadily more distant and more

  peaceful. Her hand cut a trail in the sea, as her mind made the green

  swirls and streaks into patterns and, numbed and shrouded, wandered in

  imagination in that underworld of waters where the pearls stuck in

  clusters to white sprays, where in the green light a change came over

  one's entire mind and one's body shone half transparent enveloped in a

  green cloak.

  Then the eddy slackened round her hand. The rush of the water ceased;

  the world became full of little creaking and squeaking sounds. One

  heard the waves breaking and flapping against the side of the boat as

  if they were anchored in harbour. Everything became very close to one.

  For the sail, upon which James had his eyes fixed until it had become

  to him like a person whom he knew, sagged entirely; there they came to

  a stop, flapping about waiting for a breeze, in the hot sun, miles from

  shore, miles from the Lighthouse. Everything in the whole world seemed

  to stand still. The Lighthouse became immovable, and the line of the

  distant shore became fixed. The sun grew hotter and everybody seemed

  to come very close together and to feel each other's presence, which

  they had almost forgotten. Macalister's fishing line went plumb down

  into the sea. But Mr Ramsay went on reading with his legs curled under

  him.

  He was reading a little shiny book with covers mottled like a plover's

  egg. Now and again, as they hung about in that horrid calm, he turned

  a page. And James felt that each page was turned with a peculiar

  gesture aimed at him; now assertively, now commandingly; now with the

  intention of making people pity him; and all the time, as his father

  read and turned one after another of those little pages, James kept

  dreading the moment when he would look up and speak sharply to him

  about something or other. Why were they lagging about here? he would

  demand, or something quite unreasonable like that. And if he does,

  James thought, then I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart.

  He had always kept this old symbol of taking a knife and striking his

  father to the heart. Only now, impotent rage, it was not him, that old

  man reading, whom he wanted to kill, but it was the thing that

  descended on him--without his knowing it perhaps: that fierce sudden

  black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard,

  that struck and struck at you (he could feel the beak on his bare legs,

  where it had struck when he was a child) and then made off, and there

  he was again, an old man, very sad, reading his book. That he would

  kill, that he would strike to the heart. Whatever he did--(and he

  might do anything, he felt, looking at the Lighthouse and the distant

  shore) whether he was in a business, in a bank, a barrister, a man at

  the head of some enterprise, that he would fight, that he would track

  down and stamp out--tyranny, despotism, he called it--making people

  do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak. How

  could any of them say, But I won't, when he said, Come to the

  Lighthouse. Do this. Fetch me that. The black wings spread, and the

  hard beak tore. And then next moment, there he sat reading his book;

  and he might look up--one never knew--quite reasonably. He might talk

  to the Macalisters. He might be pressing a sovereign into some frozen

  old woman's hand in the street, James thought, and he might be shouting

  out at some fisherman's sports; he might be waving his arms in the air

  with excitement. Or he might sit at the head of the table dead silent

  from one end of dinner to the other. Yes, thought James, while the

  boat slapped and dawdled there in the hot sun; there was a waste of

  snow and rock very lonely and austere; and there he had come to feel,

  quite often lately, when his father said something or did something

  which surprised the others, there were two pairs of footprints only;

  his own and his father's. They alone knew each other. What then was

  this terror, which the past had folded in him, peering into the heart

  of that forest where light and shade so chequer each other that all

  shape is distorted, and one blunders, now with the sun in one's eyes,

  now with a dark shadow, he sought an image to cool and detach and round

  off his feeling in a concrete shape. Suppose then that as a child

  sitting helpless in a perambulator, or on some one's knee, he had seen

  a waggon crush ignorantly and innocently, some one's foot? Suppose he

  had seen the foot first, in the grass, smooth, and whole; then the

  wheel; and the same foot, purple, crushed. But the wheel was innocent.

  So now, when his father came striding down the passage knocking them up

  early in the morning to go to the Lighthouse down it came over his

  foot, over Cam's foot, over anybody's foot. One sat and watched it.

  But whose foot was he thinking of, and in what garden did all this

  happen? For one had settings for these scenes; trees that grew there;

  flowers; a certain light; a few figures. Everything tended to set

  itself in a garden where there was none of this gloom. None of this

  throwing of hands about; people spoke in an ordinary tone of voice.

  They went in and out all day long. There was an old woman gossiping in

  the kitchen; and the blinds were sucked in and out by the breeze; all

  was blowing, all was growing; and over all those plates and bowls and

  tall brandishing red and yellow flowers a very thin yellow veil would

  be drawn, like a vine leaf, at night. Things became stiller and darker

  at night. But the leaf-like veil was so fine, that lights lifted it,

  voices crinkled it; he could see through it a figure stooping, hear,

  coming close, going away, some dress rustling, some chain tinkling.

  It was in this world that the wheel went over the person's foot.

  Something, he remembered, stayed flourished up in the air, something

  arid and sharp descended even there, like a blade, a scimitar, smiting

  through the leaves and flowers even of that happy world and making it

  shrivel and fall.

  "It will rain," he remembered his father saying. "You won't be able to

  go to the Lighthouse."

  The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow

  eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now--

  James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks;

  the tower, stark and straight; he could see that it was barred with

  black and white; he could see windows in it; he could even see washing

  spread on the rocks to dry. So that was the Lighthouse, was it?


  No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was simply one

  thing. The other Lighthouse was true too. It was sometimes hardly to

  be seen across the bay. In the evening one looked up and saw the eye

  opening and shutting and the light seemed to reach them in that airy

  sunny garden where they sat.

  But he pulled himself up. Whenever he said "they" or "a person," and

  then began hearing the rustle of some one coming, the tinkle of some

  one going, he became extremely sensitive to the presence of whoever

  might be in the room. It was his father now. The strain was acute.

  For in one moment if there was no breeze, his father would slap the

  covers of his book together, and say: "What's happening now? What are

  we dawdling about here for, eh?" as, once before he had brought his

  blade down among them on the terrace and she had gone stiff all over,

  and if there had been an axe handy, a knife, or anything with a sharp

  point he would have seized it and struck his father through the heart.

  She had gone stiff all over, and then, her arm slackening, so that he

  felt she listened to him no longer, she had risen somehow and gone away

  and left him there, impotent, ridiculous, sitting on the floor grasping

  a pair of scissors.

  Not a breath of wind blew. The water chuckled and gurgled in the

  bottom of the boat where three or four mackerel beat their tails up and

  down in a pool of water not deep enough to cover them. At any moment

  Mr Ramsay (he scarcely dared look at him) might rouse himself, shut his

  book, and say something sharp; but for the moment he was reading, so

  that James stealthily, as if he were stealing downstairs on bare feet,

  afraid of waking a watchdog by a creaking board, went on thinking what

  was she like, where did she go that day? He began following her from

  room to room and at last they came to a room where in a blue light, as

  if the reflection came from many china dishes, she talked to somebody;

  he listened to her talking. She talked to a servant, saying simply

  whatever came into her head. She alone spoke the truth; to her alone

  could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction

  for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into

  one's head. But all the time he thought of her, he was conscious of

  his father following his thought, surveying it, making it shiver and

  falter. At last he ceased to think.

  There he sat with his hand on the tiller in the sun, staring at the

  Lighthouse, powerless to move, powerless to flick off these grains of

  misery which settled on his mind one after another. A rope seemed to

  bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only escape

  by taking a knife and plunging it... But at that moment the sail

  swung slowly round, filled slowly out, the boat seemed to shake

  herself, and then to move off half conscious in her sleep, and then she

  woke and shot through the waves. The relief was extraordinary. They

  all seemed to fall away from each other again and to be the side of the

  boat. But his father did not rouse himself. He only raised his right

  hand mysteriously high in the air, and let it fall upon his knee again

  as if he were conducting some secret symphony.

  9

  [The sea without a stain on it, thought Lily Briscoe, still standing

  and looking out over the bay. The sea stretched like silk across the

  bay. Distance had an extraordinary power; they had been swallowed up

  in it, she felt, they were gone for ever, they had become part of the

  nature of things. It was so calm; it was so quiet. The steamer itself

  had vanished, but the great scroll of smoke still hung in the air and

  drooped like a flag mournfully in valediction.]

  10

  It was like that then, the island, thought Cam, once more drawing her

  fingers through the waves. She had never seen it from out at sea

  before. It lay like that on the sea, did it, with a dent in the middle

  and two sharp crags, and the sea swept in there, and spread away for

  miles and miles on either side of the island. It was very small;

  shaped something like a leaf stood on end. So we took a little boat,

  she thought, beginning to tell herself a story of adventure about

  escaping from a sinking ship. But with the sea streaming through her

  fingers, a spray of seaweed vanishing behind them, she did not want to

  tell herself seriously a story; it was the sense of adventure and

  escape that she wanted, for she was thinking, as the boat sailed on,

  how her father's anger about the points of the compass, James's

  obstinacy about the compact, and her own anguish, all had slipped, all

  had passed, all had streamed away. What then came next? Where were

  they going? From her hand, ice cold, held deep in the sea, there

  spurted up a fountain of joy at the change, at the escape, at the

  adventure (that she should be alive, that she should be there). And

  the drops falling from this sudden and unthinking fountain of joy fell

  here and there on the dark, the slumbrous shapes in her mind; shapes of

  a world not realised but turning in their darkness, catching here and

  there, a spark of light; Greece, Rome, Constantinople. Small as it

  was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-

  sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place

  in the universe--even that little island? The old gentlemen in the

  study she thought could have told her. Sometimes she strayed in from

  the garden purposely to catch them at it. There they were (it might be

  Mr Carmichael or Mr Bankes who was sitting with her father) sitting

  opposite each other in their low arm-chairs. They were crackling in

  front of them the pages of THE TIMES, when she came in from the garden,

  all in a muddle, about something some one had said about Christ, or

  hearing that a mammoth had been dug up in a London street, or wondering

  what Napoleon was like. Then they took all this with their clean hands

  (they wore grey-coloured clothes; they smelt of heather) and they

  brushed the scraps together, turning the paper, crossing their knees,

  and said something now and then very brief. Just to please herself she

  would take a book from the shelf and stand there, watching her father

  write, so equally, so neatly from one side of the page to another, with

  a little cough now and then, or something said briefly to the other old

  gentleman opposite. And she thought, standing there with her book open,

  one could let whatever one thought expand here like a leaf in water;

  and if it did well here, among the old gentlemen smoking and THE TIMES

  crackling then it was right. And watching her father as he wrote in

  his study, she thought (now sitting in the boat) he was not vain, nor a

  tyrant and did not wish to make you pity him. Indeed, if he saw she

  was there, reading a book, he would ask her, as gently as any one

  could, Was there nothing he could give her?

  Lest this should be wrong, she looked at him reading the little book

  with the shiny cover mottled like a plover's egg. No; it was right.

  Look at him now, she wanted to say aloud to James. (But Ja
mes had his

  eye on the sail.) He is a sarcastic brute, James would say. He brings

  the talk round to himself and his books, James would say. He is

  intolerably egotistical. Worst of all, he is a tyrant. But look! she

  said, looking at him. Look at him now. She looked at him reading the

  little book with his legs curled; the little book whose yellowish pages

  she knew, without knowing what was written on them. It was small; it

  was closely printed; on the fly-leaf, she knew, he had written that he

  had spent fifteen francs on dinner; the wine had been so much; he had

  given so much to the waiter; all was added up neatly at the bottom of

  the page. But what might be written in the book which had rounded its

  edges off in his pocket, she did not know. What he thought they none

  of them knew. But he was absorbed in it, so that when he looked up, as

  he did now for an instant, it was not to see anything; it was to pin

  down some thought more exactly. That done, his mind flew back again

  and he plunged into his reading. He read, she thought, as if he were

  guiding something, or wheedling a large flock of sheep, or pushing his

  way up and up a single narrow path; and sometimes he went fast and

  straight, and broke his way through the bramble, and sometimes it

  seemed a branch struck at him, a bramble blinded him, but he was not

  going to let himself be beaten by that; on he went, tossing over page

  after page. And she went on telling herself a story about escaping

  from a sinking ship, for she was safe, while he sat there; safe, as she

  felt herself down, and the old gentleman, lowering the paper suddenly,

  said something very brief over the top of it about the character of

  Napoleon.

  She gazed back over the sea, at the island. But the leaf was losing

  its sharpness. It was very small; it was very distant. The sea was

  more important now than the shore. Waves were all round them, tossing

  and sinking, with a log wallowing down one wave; a gull riding on

  another. About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a

  ship had sunk, and she murmured, dreamily half asleep, how we perished,

  each alone.

  11

  So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which

  had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the

  clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon

  distance: whether people are near us or far from us; for her feeling

  for Mr Ramsay changed as he sailed further and further across the bay.

  It seemed to be elongated, stretched out; he seemed to become more and

  more remote. He and his children seemed to be swallowed up in that

  blue, that distance; but here, on the lawn, close at hand, Mr

  Carmichael suddenly grunted. She laughed. He clawed his book up from

  the grass. He settled into his chair again puffing and blowing like

  some sea monster. That was different altogether, because he was so

  near. And now again all was quiet. They must be out of bed by this

  time, she supposed, looking at the house, but nothing appeared there.

  But then, she remembered, they had always made off directly a meal was

  over, on business of their own. It was all in keeping with this

  silence, this emptiness, and the unreality of the early morning hour.

  It was a way things had sometimes, she thought, lingering for a moment

  and looking at the long glittering windows and the plume of blue smoke:

  they became illness, before habits had spun themselves across the

  surface, one felt that same unreality, which was so startling; felt

  something emerge. Life was most vivid then. One could be at one's

  ease. Mercifully one need not say, very briskly, crossing the lawn to

  greet old Mrs Beckwith, who would be coming out to find a corner to sit

  in, "Oh, good-morning, Mrs Beckwith! What a lovely day! Are you going

  to be so bold as to sit in the sun? Jasper's hidden the chairs. Do