The Waves

‘Nevertheless, life is pleasant, life is tolerable. Tuesday follows Monday; then comes Wednesday. The mind grows rings; the identity becomes robust; pain is absorbed in growth. Opening and shutting, shutting and opening, with increasing hum and sturdiness, the haste and fever of youth are drawn into service until the whole being seems to expand in and out like the mainspring of a clock. How fast the stream flows from January to December! We are swept on by the torrent of things grown so familiar that they cast no shadow. We float, we float…’

Virginia Woolf – The Waves

There is a strange sense of security and stability in the cadenced movement of the sea. Smooth and supple creases fold and mount into a heaving and rippling crest of temptation, falling with languorous sighs at one’s feet in a translucent fan. There is a strange sense of security and stability in rhythm, in repeated, coherent affirmation of a logical cycle, suggesting the convenience of predictability upon which all nature works and cooperates. The ebb and flow, sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the delicate thread of human existence.

In a metaphorical span of a single day, Virginia Woolf neatly portrays the lives of six friends in a quicksilver flow of swiftly changing internal monologues, following their journey from childhood into old age, and eventually death. Fusing and melting into each other like the sky and the sea on the far horizon, their struggles and victories become an intimate reflection of the world they courageously challenge with their respective perceptions; a reflection so intimate that its nakedness and vulnerability, sincerity and passion mould into a poetry of a distinct kind, a magnificent fleuve of dazzling visions seen as if through a kaleidoscope, always fresh, always bright, titillating the mind with the possibility of an almost endless interpretation.

And all the while the waves are beating upon the shore with rhythmic patience, leaving sparse traces of gleam upon the misty sand as though in a farewell gesture.

‘It makes no sign, it does not beckon, it does not see us. Behind it roars the sea. It is beyond our reach. Yet there I venture. There I go to replenish my emptiness, to stretch my nights and fill them fuller and fuller with dreams.’

Virginia Woolf – The Waves

One ripple chases another in a steady pattern. Was there sorrow before joy, or joy before sorrow? Is it life drawing its first breath with the cry of an infant, or is it death staring at it from a mirror? Was love born of pain so insurmountable that it could not but expand and evolve into a force still greater, or is love the mother of suffering? They spin around in a dizzying dance of light and shadow as in a ceremony of courting, a play of mirrored reflections gazing at each other with their eyes wide open, longing to touch through the invisible barrier of their inherent difference. What a blessing to have them so entwined, what a miracle that they always come with their spears united to pierce the chest, what a delight to become so attuned to the nuances of pain that life ceases to be merely a chain of haphazard external sensations, and suddenly becomes an internal truth, a tangible mass of hardened facets of love. A life well lived is life subdued, exposed to the reality of fear and ecstasy, a hard stone upon which rivulets of tears engraved their pathways.

‘There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love.’

Virginia Woolf – The Waves

A life well lived is a life perceived fully, accepted unconditionally in all its staggering variety, so that, finding oneself at the end of all crossroads, looking back one hears himself say – yes, I, too, have been there.

*my diary entry, April 2019