What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight. Woven together, inextricably commingled, bound in pain and strewn in sorrow—crash!
Virginia Woolf – The String Quartet
Like a flow of tender ripples, the words come rushing forward with a sparkling foam on their crests, seeping through the paper in merry chant of playful, Mozartean lightness as Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness unfolds in a crowded room filled with expectation-charged silence where four figures in fancy suits simultaneously lift the bows in elegant, sweeping arch, ready to touch the tense strings impatiently bursting with the wealth of unheard melodies.
The narrator’s thoughts pace back and forth between scattered exchanges whispered in the mild shadows of the dimly-lighted concert room and a wild torrent of vivid imagery, a flame ignited by the essential spark of music. Woolf’s narrative is music itself, her voice is a bow held in the deft fingers of a virtuoso violinist whose crystalline tone is brimming with passion, subtle twists leading into unexpected, soaring altered chords in what seems to be a perfectly non-defined, structure-defying symphonic poem.
A miniature of fleeting perceptions and ephemeral feelings, though little revealing about music itself, The String Quartet is thought to be one of Virginia Woolf’s most acclaimed short stories. Just follow the path of music, the path of her words, grasping the silky threads of little nuances here and there, arriving to places never known before. Rushing from one scale into another in a stream of consciousness, the breath of her melody leaves you bedazzled and stupefied, like two musicians recovering from the heat of improvisation, looking at each other in profound amazement when the last pearly notes of their instruments dissolve in gentle diminuendo and blend into the welcoming embrace of silence, not realizing how they got from one key to another.
The boat sinks. Rising, the figures ascend, but now leaf thin, tapering to a dusky wraith, which, fiery tipped, draws its twofold passion from my heart. For me it sings, unseals my sorrow, thaws compassion, floods with love the sunless world, nor, ceasing, abates its tenderness but deftly, subtly, weaves in and out until in this pattern, this consummation, the cleft ones unify; soar, sob, sink to rest, sorrow and joy.
Virginia Woolf – The String Quartet
L'art de subtilité 