Chapter 41 Chapter Eleven

Lily Briscoe stared at the sea, which was so blue and clear that there was hardly a speck, and it was so soft that the solitary sails and white clouds seemed to be embedded in the blue waves.How much distance matters, she thought: how we feel about other people depends on how far they are from us; for, as Mr Ramsay sailed farther and farther across the bay, she Feelings are changing.It seemed to extend, to expand; he seemed to be getting further and further away from her.He and his children seemed to be swallowed up by the blue wave, by the distance; but here, within arm's reach on the lawn, Mr. Carmichael suddenly let out a snore.she laughed.He snatched his book from the grass.He sat down again in his chair, panting and snoring like some monster in the sea.That feeling was totally different because he was so close.Now everything is quiet again.They must all be up by this time, she supposed, and she looked at the room, but there was no movement.Then she remembered that they always went away as soon as they finished their meal, to go about their own business.All this is in perfect harmony with the still, empty, ethereal atmosphere of the early morning hours.She lingered for a moment, looking at the long glass windows shining with sunlight, and the feathery blue smoke on the roof, thinking that this is how things sometimes are: they become ethereal.How amazing it is to have the same ethereal feeling when you return from a trip or recover from a long illness, before habits have wove their webs over the surface of things; Stuff is emerging.This is the busiest time.You can relax and have nothing to worry about.You don't have to go across the lawn to meet Mrs. Beckwith, who has come out of the house to sit in a corner, and say to her very briskly: "Oh, good morning, Mrs. Beckwith! What a fine day it is." ! Aren't you afraid to sit in the sun? Jess has all those chairs hidden. You'll have to let me find you one!" And all the other niceties, too, were avoided.You don't have to say anything.You shake your sails and glide between the things, leaving them far behind (there's a lot of activity in the bay, lots of little boats out to sea).The bay is no longer empty, but teeming with life.She seemed to stand deep in some substance, in which she moved, floated, sank, yes, for these waters were unfathomable.So much life has been poured into this torrent.The lives of the Ramsays; the lives of the children; and other odds and ends.A washerwoman with a basket; a rook; a flaming poker; the deep purple and grey-green of flowers: some sense of commonness contained it all.

Ten years ago, she had stood in almost the same spot, and maybe it was some sense of completeness like this that made her say to herself that she must have fallen in love with this place.Love has a thousand forms.Perhaps there are some lovers whose genius consists in being able to select elements from various things and bring them together, thus giving them a wholeness which they lack in real life. The sights or the (now dispersed) encounters of people combine into a compact sphere upon which thought wanders and love plays. Her eyes rested on the brown blotch of Mr. Ramsay's sailboat.She figured they would reach the lighthouse by lunchtime.But a stronger wind blew up, the sky and sea shifted slightly, the boats shifted their positions, and what seemed miraculously fixed a short time ago now seemed less disturbing. Satisfied.The wind had blown away the plume of smoke that hung in the air; there was something unpleasant about the position of the ships.

The disproportionate spectacle that appeared there seemed to disturb her inner harmony.She felt a nameless melancholy.This feeling of melancholy intensified as she turned to face her own picture.She's been wasting a good time this morning.For some reason or other she had not been able to maintain the delicate balance between those two opposing forces, Mr. Ramsay and the picture; and such a balance was necessary.Perhaps there is something wrong with the layout of the picture?She was thinking: Does the line of the fence need to be cut off, is the cluster of trees drawn too densely?She smiled ironically; for, when she began to write, didn't she think she had solved the problem?

So what's the problem?She must be trying to catch something that escaped her.It escaped her when she thought of Mr. Ramsay; now, when she thought of her picture, it escaped her.All kinds of words and images came one after another.beautiful picture.Beautiful words.But it was the thrill of the nerves, the thing itself, that she wanted to catch, before it could be turned into anything else.She stood firmly in front of the easel again, and said desperately: grab it and start painting from the beginning; grab it and start painting from the beginning.What a poor, imbecile machine, she thought, is the human drawing and sensory organs, which always fail at the last moment; yet you must persevere with heroic tenacity.She frowned and watched intently.Without a doubt, that is the hedge.However, you begged hard, but got nothing.You look at the line of the fence, or think back—she was wearing a gray hat—and all you get in return is an angry stare.She is amazingly beautiful.Let it come, she thought, if it will come.Because, sometimes you can neither think nor feel.And if you neither think nor feel, she thought, then where are you?

Here, on the lawn, on the ground, she thought.She sat down and, with her paintbrush, parted the clumps of plantain and examined them carefully.Because the lawn is very uneven.Here she is, she thought, sitting on the earth, because she couldn't shake the feeling that everything this morning was happening for the first time and maybe the last time, like a traveler, even if he was in Half asleep looking out the window of the train, he knew he must take a look now, because he would never see that town again, or that donkey cart, or that woman working in the fields.She looked at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed to agree with hers (though they hadn't spoken a word all this time), and she thought that the lawn was the world, and here they climbed together to this sublime situation.Maybe she will never see him again.He is getting older.He is also increasingly famous.Thinking of this, she couldn't help laughing as she looked at the slippers dangling from his feet.People say his poems are "very beautiful".They even went as far as publishing works he wrote forty years ago.Now there was a well-known man named Mr. Carmichael, she thought with a smile, how many different images a man can have, he was such a prominent figure in the papers, but here he was still the same.He looked the same--only a little grayer.Yes, he didn't look changed at all, however, she remembered someone saying that since Andrew Ramsay's bad news came (he was hit by shrapnel and died instantly; otherwise he would have been a great mathematician home), Mr. Carmichael "has lost all interest in life".What the hell does that mean?She doesn't know.Did he pick up a cane and stride across London's Trafalgar Square?Had he sat in his room in St John's Wood, turning page after page without reading a word?She didn't know what Andrew did when he died, but she could also feel the changes in him caused by this blow.They just greet each other vaguely when they meet on the stairs; they look up at the sky and talk casually about the weather.Yet this, she thought, was the only way to know a man: in outline, not in detail; as one sitting in one's own garden looking out upon a purple vista on the hillside, stretching far into the heather.That's how she got to know him.She knew how much he had changed.She never read a line of his poems.Yet she thought she knew what his poems sounded like.It has a slow rhythm and a sonorous rhythm.It is sophisticated and free and easy, with endless charm.It was a poem about the desert and camels.It was a poem about sunsets and palms.Its attitude is profoundly objective; it sometimes deals with death; it rarely talks about love.He himself has a detached objective attitude.He has no demands on others.Didn't he always try to avoid Mrs Ramsay when he staggered unnaturally past the drawing-room window with the newspaper under his arm?For some reason, he doesn't like her very much.So of course she always tried to stop him.He would bow to her.He would barely stop and bow deeply to her.Mrs Ramsay, disappointed to see that he wanted nothing from her, would ask him (which Lily heard): Would you like a coat, a blanket, a newspaper?No, he wants nothing. (He bows again now.) There is something about her that he doesn't like.Maybe it's her bossy, overconfident attitude and practical temper.How straight she is.

(A sound—the rattling of hinges—gaves Lily's attention, causing her to look toward the parlor window. A breeze is playing with the window.) Somebody, Lily thought, must not like her (yes; she knew the drawing-room window was empty, but she didn't feel much about it. She didn't need Mrs Ramsay now.)—they thought she was too Confident, too harsh.Maybe her beauty is also off-putting.They may say: always look like that, how monotonous!They favor another type of beauty—dark complexions, vivacious personalities.She is too weak in front of her husband.She made him fly into a rage and didn't stop it.She is taciturn.No one knew exactly what she had been through.And (to come back to Carmichael and what he didn't like) you can't imagine Mrs Ramsay standing on the grass all morning drawing, or lying there reading.This is unimaginable.She didn't speak a word, and with a basket on her arm as the only sign of her errands, she set off into the city to visit poor people, sitting in some sweltering, cramped bedroom.Lily often found that in the middle of people's games or discussions, she quietly left, with a basket on her arm, and walked away very straight.She also noticed her return.She had thought, half amused (how methodically she placed those teacups), half moved (how amazing her beauty was), that those eyes, now painfully closed, were looking at you just now.You were there with them.

Mrs Ramsay would be upset if someone was late, or because the butter was stale, or the teapot was chipped.When she babbles and complains that the butter is stale, you think of the Greek temples, of the sweltering huts where Beauty lived with the paupers.She never mentioned it - she went straight to it on time.She went there by her instinct, which, like the swallow to the south and the artichoke to the sun, inevitably made her turn toward all human beings to make her nest in their hearts.And it, like all instincts, vexed those without them; perhaps so with Mr. Carmichael; certainly so with herself.They both had a common opinion on the futility of Mrs Ramsay's actions and the nobility of her thoughts.Her visits to the poor were a reproach to them, a force to give the world a reversal in a different direction, causing them to object; Hold on to them.Mr. Charles Tansley did that sort of thing too; that's one of the reasons people don't like him.He disrupted the balance of other people's worlds.She speculated about his situation as she idly fingered the plantain clumps with her paintbrush.He already has the title of researcher.He was married and lived in the Gold Green estate.

One day, during the Great War, she went to a great hall to hear him speak.He is condemning a phenomenon, blaming certain characters.He is preaching brotherhood.All she felt was how could he be in love with his fellow man?He cannot tell two different pictures, and as he stands behind her smoking a cheap pipe (“fivepence an ounce, Miss Briscoe”), he feels it his duty to warn her that women cannot write and they cannot paint.He said this not because he believed it, but for some curious reason he wished it so.Slender, flushed, thick-sounding, he preached hoarsely from the pulpit the gospel of love (her paintbrush disturbed the ants crawling among the grass—the red, energetic, glittering ants, Just like Charles Tansley).In the half-empty hall, she sat mockingly watching him pouring love into the cold space from her seat, and before her eyes, the old wooden barrel appeared again, rising and falling with the waves Floating all at once, and Mrs. Ramsay, looking for her spectacle case among the pebbles. "Oh, my! What a nuisance! It's gone again. Don't bother, Mr. Tansley, I lose a thousand spectacle cases every summer." At this, he drew his jaw back against it. His collar, as if he dared not approve of such exaggeration, but it came from a character he liked, and he could bear it, so he smiled very cutely.He must have confided his secrets to her after a long wandering, when the people dispersed to go home.Mrs. Ramsay had told her once that Tansley was giving his little sister a chance at school.His spirit is very commendable.Her own opinion of him was absurd, Lily knew that very well.She fiddled with the grass with a paintbrush.After all, half of what a person thinks about other people is absurd.This perception is entirely motivated by one's own personal motives.He played the role of "the scourged" in her mind.When she was furious, she found herself flogging his bony flanks in her imagination.If she wanted to take him seriously, she would have to turn to Mrs Ramsay's point of view and see him through her eyes.

She built a small hill for the ants to climb over.Her disturbance of their little world drove them into a frenzy of indecision.Some ants rushed this way, others rushed that way. She thought: One needs fifty pairs of eyes to see.Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough, she thought, to see that woman from all directions.Among these eyes, there must be one that was completely blind to her beauty.A person desperately needs some sense of mystery, ethereal as air, which can pass through the keyhole and envelop her, wrap her thoughts, Her imagination, her desires were stored and treasured, as the air contained the steamer's smoke.What did the fence mean to her, what did the garden mean, what did the splash of a wave mean? (Lily looked up as she had seen Mrs. Ramsay look up; she too heard a wave crashing on the beach and splashing.) When the children were playing cricket they cried, "What's the matter?" What's going on?" At this moment, what feeling was churning and trembling in her heart?She will stop knitting for a while.She seemed to be holding her breath.Then she would fall into thought again, when suddenly Mr Ramsay, who was pacing, stood still before her, and some strange shudder ran through her, startling her in the midst of agitation, when Ramsay Mr. Qi stood there, bending down and looking down at her.Lily could see his shadow.

He reached out and helped her up from the chair.As if he had done this before; as if he had helped her in the same way once once from a boat that was inches from an island and needed gentlemen to help the ladies ashore.It was an old-fashioned scene, and it pretty much required the ladies to wear long skirts with gussets and the gentlemen to wear top-shaped hunting pants that were wide at the hip and narrow at the ankle.Mrs. Ramsay thought (Lily guessed) as she let him take her by the hand to get her ashore: now at last the time had come.Yes, now she was going to speak her mind.Yes, she is willing to marry him.So she went ashore calmly and peacefully.Perhaps, she only said one word, leaving her hand still in his.Perhaps, she told him, shaking hands with him, I would marry you; but there was no other word.Between them, the same excitement arose again and again—obviously, Lily thought as she brushed the grass to clear a path for the ants.She wasn't making it up; she was just trying to bring out something that had been hidden for years; something she had witnessed.Because, on that bumpy, twisty road of everyday life, with the kids and the guests around, you get that constant cliché—feeling that where one thing fell, another fell. Something, there was an echo, oscillating in the air.

Yet it was a mistake, she thought.She remembered how they walked away together arm in arm, past the conservatory, to untie the knot between them.She was impulsive and irritable; he was morose and irritable--that was not a happy life.Oh no.Early in the morning, the bedroom door would slam shut with a bang.He would start throwing tantrums at the breakfast table.He'd swoosh his plate out the window.Then the whole house will have a feeling that the wind is coming, as if the door is banging, the curtains are flying and fluttering in the wind, and people are running around in a hurry, trying to close the skylight and keep the wind blown away. Organize loose things.One day she met Paul Reilly on the stairs, and that was the way it was.Apparently one of them had fallen onto his plate.Others may also spot centipedes.They couldn't stop laughing. And yet, whizzing the saucer out of the window like that, and slamming the door behind her--it really annoyed and discouraged Mrs Ramsay.Sometimes there would be long periods of dead silence between the two of them, a state of mind which annoyed Lily, making her melancholy and indignant.Mrs. Ramsay did not seem to be able to take such storms lightly, or to laugh as they did, but perhaps there was something lurking in her weariness.She bowed her head in thought and sat silently.After a while, he would linger quietly around her—beside the window where she sat writing or chatting, and she would be deliberately busy doing something when he passed by, to avoid him, pretending not to worry about it. see him.Then he would become smooth and soft as silk, humble and gentle, courteous, trying to win her over.She still wouldn't allow him to approach her, uncharacteristically, for a while, she put on an air of arrogance and pride that matched her beauty, and she would turn her face, or turn her back, always facing Minta, Paul, or William Banks.Finally, the wolf-like figure standing outside the circle (Lily stood up from the lawn, she looked at the stone steps and the window where she had seen him), he would call her by name, only Once, like a howling wolf in the snow, she would not let him approach; he would call her again, and this time something in the tone of his voice would startle her, and she would suddenly leave them and come to him. and they would both go away together and walk among the pear trees and vegetable beds and wild berries.Together they will frankly untangle the knots in their hearts.But what was their attitude and what language did they use?At this moment there was an air of solemnity in their mutual relations which made Lily, Paul, and Minta turn away, mask their curiosity and displeasure, and began picking flowers, throwing balls, chatting, until At dinner time, the two of them came back again, taking their seats at opposite ends of the table as usual. "Why don't you study botany?... You all have legs and arms, why don't you study any...?" And so they would talk and laugh among the children as usual.Everything was just as it always was, except that something quivered, as if a knife's blade had flickered in the air, cutting down among them; as if after an hour's walk among the pear trees and vegetable beds, the children were sitting around them. The common sight of drinking soup seemed very fresh to the two of them.Especially Mrs. Ramsay, Lily thought, looking at Prue.She sat in the center, between her brothers and sisters, and seemed always so busy and attentive to make everything run smoothly and without error that she hardly spoke to herself.How Prue blamed himself for the worms in the milk!How pale she grew when Mr. Ramsay threw his plate out the window!How depressing was the long silence between her parents!In any case, now her mother seemed to be making up for her loss, reassuring her that everything was going well, promising her that she would find the same happiness one day.However, she later enjoyed the bliss of marriage for less than a year. She let the flowers in her basket drop to the floor, Lily thought.She turned her small eyeballs up and took a step back, as if she was looking at her drawing, but she was not drawing, all her senses were in a trance dream state, her appearance was dumbfounded, but her heart was extremely Move at a fast speed. She let her flowers fall out of their baskets, and spill and roll over the grass, and she herself went away with reluctant hesitation, but without questioning or complaining—was she not the instinct of complete obedience?The fields and valleys were all white, and the ground was strewn with flowers—she should have painted it that way.Those mountains are unpretentious, craggy and steep.The waves lapped muffled against the rocks below.They went off, all three of them, Mrs Ramsay walking ahead rather quickly, as if expecting to meet someone at the corner of the road. Suddenly, behind the window she was looking at, a white figure appeared.Finally someone came into the living room and sat in a chair.God bless!She prayed in her heart: let them sit there quietly, and don't come out to talk to her in a mess.Whoever he was, thankfully, was still inside, and happened to cast a curious triangular shadow on the stone steps.It slightly changes the layout of the screen.It's very interesting.It might be of some use.Her interest returned.You had to stare at it, not letting go for a second of that intense concentration and determination not to be taken in.You have to hold on to the scene—that’s all—like a vise to hold it tight so that nothing extraneous gets in and spoils it.As she dipped her paintbrush leisurely, she thought thoughtfully: You have to be on the same level as ordinary everyday experience, simply feel that it is a chair, that this is a table, and at the same time, you have to feel It was a miracle, an ecstatic sight.In the final analysis, the problem is possible to solve.Ah, but what happened?A white wave swept across the glass window.The specter of that air must have caused some sort of commotion in the room.Her heart swooped toward her, grabbed her, tormented her. "Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!" she cried, feeling a return of some terror--desiring and wanting nothing.Can she still restrain that feeling of fear?Then she quieted down, as if she had reined in herself and made that emotion a part of everyday experience too, on the same level as the chair and table.Mrs. Ramsay--that figure was a part of her perfection--sat in her chair, twitching the steel needle in her hand lightly to and fro, knitting her reddish-brown wool stockings, and casting her shadow on On the stone steps.She just sits there. As if she had something to share, and yet she could hardly leave her easel, full of what she was thinking and seeing, Lily passed Mr. Carmichael, brush in hand, as far as the edge of the lawn.Where is that boat now?And what about Mr. Ramsay?She needs him.