lolloping away on the green sea waves
Mrs. Dalloway is one of those novels that delights in its own lush vocabulary and rich phrasing. It’s a dangerous thing for a novel to be because if it doesn’t work out perfectly, the words end up sounding absurdly pretentious and hollow. When it does work, though, it’s amazing. It was mentioned in class that Mrs. Dalloway is a novel of moments, and the moments I spend reading it throughout my day are charged with the same kind of beauty it describes in small bits. It’s also arrived in my life at a very apt time. There are some points in life that feel like slow progressions, but there are some times that, like the novel, seem to be created moment by moment. The beginning of the second semester of my twelfth year at Providence Day School feels much more like the latter: refreshing college websites frantically in hopes of receiving any news at all, filling out senior superlative worksheets, drinking peppermint tea and making my way through the buildup of math homework I’ve created for myself. Of course this is how life unfolds in general: moments turn to hours turn to days to weeks to years to a concrete overview you can place in a jar and comfortably label a complete life. But here, very much stuck between twelve to seventeen years of my past and four to who knows how many years of my future, the moments feel particularly poignant. Virginia Woolf’s gorgeous words couldn’t have entered my life at a better time.
