I'm currently reading Rebecca Solnit's wonderful "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" whilst ruminating on a current project with primary school children to create an imaginary version of Stoke-on-Trent. I could talk for hours about the flood of ideas its generating and theories of how to create personal transcendental experiences within familiar seemingly limiting environments, how to create hope through imagination in the everyday, but maybe that is for another time. For now it is a passage from Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse" that spoke to me and created today's atmosphere of poignant optimism, so I thought I would write it here to speak elsewhere...:
"For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well, not even to think. 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. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless... Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless."
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1 comment:
solnit is great. not read that one xx
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