{"id":11515,"date":"2025-09-10T18:20:54","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:20:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/virginia-woolf-on-love-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T18:20:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:20:54","slug":"virginia-woolf-on-love-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/virginia-woolf-on-love-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Virginia Woolf on Love \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI think we moderns lack love,\u201d Virginia Woolf<\/a> (January 25, 1882\u2013March 28, 1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war. <\/p>\n

The paradox is that when we lack something long enough, we forget what it looks like, what it means, how to recognize it when it comes along. And so we love without knowing how to love<\/a>, wounding ourselves and each other.<\/p>\n

Over and over, in her novels and her essays, in her letters and her journals, Woolf tried to locate love, to anneal it, to define it in order to reinstate it at the center of life. <\/p>\n

\"\"
Virginia Woolf<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cTo love makes one solitary,\u201d she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway<\/em> a generation before Sylvia Plath contemplated the loneliness of love<\/a> \u2014 because \u201cnothing is so strange when one is in love\u2026 as the complete indifference of other people.\u201d <\/p>\n

Two years later, she set out to \u201cthrow light upon the question of love\u201d in To the Lighthouse<\/em><\/a>, to illuminate its \u201cthousand shapes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Nothing, she wrote, could be \u201cmore serious\u2026 more commanding, more impressive, bearing in its bosom the seeds of death.\u201d <\/p>\n

Against \u201cthe heat of love, its horror, its cruelty, its scrupulosity,\u201d she pitted the kind of love \u201cthat never attempted to clutch its object but, like the love that mathematicians bear their symbols or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.\u201d She found it \u201chelpful\u201d and \u201cexalting\u201d to know that people could love like that. <\/p>\n

At its best, at its truest, the experience of falling in love partakes of that exaltation, that transcendent participancy in the order of things. She captures the phase transition as her characters flood with \u201cbeing in love\u201d: <\/p>\n

\n

They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting [was] how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Above all, perhaps, love is a function of time and chance, time and choice \u2014 an equivalence that Woolf conjures up on the pages of Orlando<\/em><\/a>, drawing on her relationship with Vita Sackville-West to compose what Vita\u2019s son would later call \u201cthe longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which [Virginia] explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her.\u201d<\/a> Here, to love someone is to choose them again and again day after day, century after century, as they change and morph and fluctuate across the spectrum of being, to continue to see and cherish the kernel of the person beneath the costume of personality, the soul beneath the self<\/a>. In this sense, love is a revelation of the essence \u2014 \u201csomething central,\u201d she wrote in Mrs. Dalloway<\/em>, that permeates the fabric of a person, \u201csomething warm\u201d that breaks up the surface and ripples the \u201ccold contact\u201d between people:<\/p>\n

\n

It was a sudden revelation, a tinge like a blush which one tried to check and then, as it spread, one yielded to its expansion, and rushed to the farthest verge and there quivered and felt the world come closer, swollen with some astonishing significance, some pressure of rapture, which split its thin skin and gushed and poured with an extraordinary alleviation\u2026 an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The great tragedy of human life is that we ask of love everything and gives us an almost; the great triumph is that we know this, know the price of the illumination, and we choose to love anyway<\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI think we moderns lack love,\u201d Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882\u2013March 28, 1941) diagnosed us in the first year of our deadliest war. The paradox […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-purpose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}