From my ‘Word Couture’ Quote Collection

“She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs,
of being out, out, far out to sea and alone;
she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous
to live even one day.”

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Mrs. Dalloway. One of V. Woolf’s masterpieces, in my opinion, because Woolf really crossed a creative line and took on one of a writer’s toughest challenges. Clarissa Dalloway. Many literary critics labeled her as suffering from ‘nervous strain’ or ‘melancholy’. But I see it differently. I see Clarissa as a character who detaches herself from reality. (Like in the quote “… being out, out, far to sea…” while on a busy London street). And then, she experiences what I can only call ‘heightened awareness’ for lack of a better term. The way she zooms in on something when she ‘detaches’ is so exaggerated – how her mind processes and perceives it and how ‘high volume’ her sensory perception becomes as well.

This is where Woolf’s brilliance as a writer comes in. She showed how Clarissa would silence the noise and activities around her – but how she would then focus on one thing – and that would startle her – or jolt her – or provoke her to face a disturbing thought.

Image: Both sides of a photo of Virginia Woolf, 1927 – in the public domain.