Uncertainty is usually a disquieting word as it conveys a negativity. Uncertainty, it seems, in most situations seems to suggest that there is probably something bad about to happen. We hear it said that 'life expectancy is uncertain', 'it is uncertain if we will succeed', or 'this economy is uncertain'.
However, to me, uncertainty is not so scary. Nay, it is the essence of life. Perhaps it is even godlike and should be the principle of life -- thus we could capitalize it with a U (the great U). A horseshoe shape isn't such a bad symbol for the meaning of life, is it? In any case, what I mean is that uncertainty is much less dramatic if we think about it. We can certainly be uncertain about danger lurking ahead or about calamity striking at any moment; however, we also know that we can be uncertain about the possibility of something wonderful happening. Uncertainty, in my mind, conveys both sides of this danger/no danger binary--I think underneath the word uncertainty is possibility.
In therapy yesterday, I felt comfort in the fact that much is uncertain. And that is perhaps because I've seen much around me that shows just how uncertain life is. Instead of running scared from the big bad uncertainty monster, maybe we should just embrace it. I felt I had embraced this fuzzy sense of unknowing called uncertainty by yesterday about mid-therapy session. My therapist had asked me what theme I thought the session had. I responded, "In short, life is uncertain!"
We really don't know if we are going to be alive or dead from one moment to the next. There is a probability that most of us will make it to the golden years, but we cannot bank on it. However, there are several possibilities along a spectrum of outcomes! We must remember that there is no black and white, but a spectrum of colors. This is the power of the word uncertain. "I am uncertain what my grade will be in my class," one might say. What this person means is that he/she is not sure if she/he is getting a passing grade. However, it may be an A, B, C, D, or F. There are a range of possibilities.
All of life's outcomes are singular options from a cornucopia of many realities. Yes, something horrible may happen, but something good might just as easily happen. So, the next time you hear or read the word "uncertainty", please take comfort in the fact that this communicates many possibilities, not just one lurking danger!
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Letter to Virginia Woolf (Upon Reading the first half of To the Lighthouse)
Dear Virginia Woolf,
With shame I must admit that until now I had only read your essays. Just as your protagonist Mrs. Ramsay asks, "What have I done with my life?", I too must ask what have I done till now without reading your fiction? Though I have always been drawn to you, sometimes for absurd reasons such as sharing the same birthday, I have not read more of your work.
However, that has all changed, for I am in the midst of To the Lighthouse. I absolutely adore this novel because of its genius. Wondrous lines of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, all written in nicely fashioned lyrical lines, fill this novel and make it both pleasing and enlightening to read.
Your essay "Modern Fiction," a criticism of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, notes that their writing is "concerned not with the spirit but with the body" (MF 2149). You state that the "form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek" (MF 2150). And, as you so eloquently state, "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end" (MF 2150). It is the luminous halo that you show so well in the lyrical arrangements of the brain-talk (as I call the various ways of protraying inner thoughts of characters).
For example, the striking scene of Mrs. Ramsay reading the story to her son James is interspersed with all sorts of thoughts along the way. While there is this bodily action of plot, the inner life of Mrs. Ramsay tells us more. While reading aloud, the passage slips into Mrs. Ramsay's mind nimbly. Consider this excerpt:
Three voices whirl around here: Mrs. Ramsay's physical voice, the narrator, and Mrs. Ramsay's inner voice or mind. This third voice adds a level of life that is not always present in narrative. The narrator's third point account is peeled back, and we see into the head of Mrs. Ramsay.
The beauty of your language and figures of speech also compel me to read more. When serving soup, Mrs. Ramsay wonders "how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for [her husband]" (TLH 83). Instead, she "had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy -there- and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it" (TLH 83). She is performing a domestic chore that she seems to increasingly grow weary of. The comparison of her life to the whirling of soup when being ladled is a poignant analogy. The word eddy means water that moves in circular pattern against the current. Often when ladling, there is an circular motion that forms around the ladle. The soup seems to represent Mrs. Ramsay's current life, and her life seems to be a circular life of domesticity that drains her. Furthermore, her husband, the distanced unhappy philosopher, who feels his scholarly life is hampered by being a husband and father, seems to drain her most acutely.
With the brain-talk and striking similes and analogies throughout your novel, we see that life, in all its luminosity and truth, is presented to us. Instead of heavy plot, we see an inner life of high points, low points, love, antagonism, hatred, ambivalence and contradictions. You state so well that the "mind receives a myriad impressions-- [...] an incessant shower of innumerable atoms [...][that] shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday"(MF 2150).
So, my interest builds through these impressions on the page. The action of the narrative might be cloaked by the presentation of all the impressions. Yet, just as someone places hands over her ears and can then hear her own breath, the placing of impressions over action allows us to see the life of the story.
I am also eager to see how Mrs. Ramsay deals with the Angel speaking in her ear. The soup scene seems to be the moment of the novel where the protagonist might begin to resent that Angel of the house that you had to kill off. I must read on.
Thank you, Mrs. Woolf, for your fiction. It has added nutrients to my life today.
Sincerely,
Charles
Citations
Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 2149 - 2150. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1992.
With shame I must admit that until now I had only read your essays. Just as your protagonist Mrs. Ramsay asks, "What have I done with my life?", I too must ask what have I done till now without reading your fiction? Though I have always been drawn to you, sometimes for absurd reasons such as sharing the same birthday, I have not read more of your work.
However, that has all changed, for I am in the midst of To the Lighthouse. I absolutely adore this novel because of its genius. Wondrous lines of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, all written in nicely fashioned lyrical lines, fill this novel and make it both pleasing and enlightening to read.
Your essay "Modern Fiction," a criticism of H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and John Galsworthy, notes that their writing is "concerned not with the spirit but with the body" (MF 2149). You state that the "form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek" (MF 2150). And, as you so eloquently state, "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end" (MF 2150). It is the luminous halo that you show so well in the lyrical arrangements of the brain-talk (as I call the various ways of protraying inner thoughts of characters).
For example, the striking scene of Mrs. Ramsay reading the story to her son James is interspersed with all sorts of thoughts along the way. While there is this bodily action of plot, the inner life of Mrs. Ramsay tells us more. While reading aloud, the passage slips into Mrs. Ramsay's mind nimbly. Consider this excerpt:
"'Well, what does she want then?' said the Flounder?" And where were they now? Mrs Ramsay wondered, reading and thinking, quite easily, both at the same time; for the story of the Fisherman and his Wife was like the bass gently accompanying a tune, which now and then ran up unexpectedly into the melody. And what should she be told? If nothing happened, she would have to speak seriously to Minta" (TLH 56).
Three voices whirl around here: Mrs. Ramsay's physical voice, the narrator, and Mrs. Ramsay's inner voice or mind. This third voice adds a level of life that is not always present in narrative. The narrator's third point account is peeled back, and we see into the head of Mrs. Ramsay.
The beauty of your language and figures of speech also compel me to read more. When serving soup, Mrs. Ramsay wonders "how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for [her husband]" (TLH 83). Instead, she "had a sense of being past everything, through everything, out of everything, as she helped the soup, as if there was an eddy -there- and one could be in it, or one could be out of it, and she was out of it" (TLH 83). She is performing a domestic chore that she seems to increasingly grow weary of. The comparison of her life to the whirling of soup when being ladled is a poignant analogy. The word eddy means water that moves in circular pattern against the current. Often when ladling, there is an circular motion that forms around the ladle. The soup seems to represent Mrs. Ramsay's current life, and her life seems to be a circular life of domesticity that drains her. Furthermore, her husband, the distanced unhappy philosopher, who feels his scholarly life is hampered by being a husband and father, seems to drain her most acutely.
With the brain-talk and striking similes and analogies throughout your novel, we see that life, in all its luminosity and truth, is presented to us. Instead of heavy plot, we see an inner life of high points, low points, love, antagonism, hatred, ambivalence and contradictions. You state so well that the "mind receives a myriad impressions-- [...] an incessant shower of innumerable atoms [...][that] shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday"(MF 2150).
So, my interest builds through these impressions on the page. The action of the narrative might be cloaked by the presentation of all the impressions. Yet, just as someone places hands over her ears and can then hear her own breath, the placing of impressions over action allows us to see the life of the story.
I am also eager to see how Mrs. Ramsay deals with the Angel speaking in her ear. The soup scene seems to be the moment of the novel where the protagonist might begin to resent that Angel of the house that you had to kill off. I must read on.
Thank you, Mrs. Woolf, for your fiction. It has added nutrients to my life today.
Sincerely,
Charles
Citations
Woolf, Virginia. "Modern Fiction." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. 2149 - 2150. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1992.
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