Jandy’s Anthology

Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf

selections

Why was it that relations between different people were so unsatisfying, so fragmentary, so hazardous, and words so dangerous that the instinct to sympathise with another human being was an instinct to be examined carefully and probably crushed?

He shouted out a line of poetry, but the words escaped him, and he stumbled along lines and fragments of lines which had no meaning at all except for the beauty of the words.

They were no longer embarrassed or half-choked with meaning which could not express itself; they were not afraid of each other, or, like travellers down a twisting river, dazzled with sudden beauties when the corner is turned; the unexpected happened, but even the ordinary was lovable, and in many ways preferable to the ecstatic and mysterious, for it was refreshingly solid, and called out effort, and effort under such circumstances was not effort but delight.

Filed under: 20th-century, Britain, fiction on December 20th, 2006