Transcript: …Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word "incarnadine, " for example – who can use that without remembering "multitudinous seas"? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence.
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I would argue that she's being a little hard on the writers of her generation, including herself. She continues: "We pin them [words] down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. " I breathe and pause to let this image sit for a moment. How often have I felt this way? The essay continues, giving additional insight into her writing process: she says it's critical to include a pause while writing, a caesura, where we "become unconscious. Our unconscious is their [words] privacy; our darkness is their light…That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. " Am I taking the time to pause, to create a shadowy zeitgeist of words? For some writers, this pause may mean meditation, for others a walk or dreamtime. We must impede our forward progress for a moment or a month–to internalize the essence of what it is we're trying to communicate.
Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change. Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination.
Welcome to Woolf Online Published in 2013, Woolf Online is currently a digital archive of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) Project Overview The site is intended to serve as a resource for research and study of Woolf's modernist classic. On this site you will find images and transcriptions of the holograph drafts (in three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library), the typescripts, the proofs, and various early editions of the novel, including the first British and American editions and their variants. Also included is a wealth of contextual materials, such as diary entries and letters pertaining to the novel, early reviews of the novel, selected essays Woolf wrote during the two- year period during which she worked on To the Lighthouse, and photographs of the Stephen family, Cornwall, and Talland House, all of which inform the setting and characters of the novel. Because the three notebooks housed in the Berg Collection are fragile and access to them is now severely limited, Woolf Online performs an especially valuable service by making these drafts available to scholars, students and the public at large in brilliant images, easily legible with the aid of a magnifying feature and easily readable with transcriptions that overlay images of the originals.
This is the only surviving recording of the voice of author Virginia Woolf. The extract is from a talk was called "Craftsmanship" and was broadcast on the BBC on April 29th, 1937 as part of a series called "Words Fail Me".
You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word "incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas. " To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question. And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing.
My sprouting social anxiety was like a dark-tinted pair of sunglasses that placed every encounter behind a murky, paranoid filter. Making female friends, which had always been my source of social strength, became a struggle. I felt alone, and I felt desperate not to be alone, and I felt terrified that my few intimates would figure out how desperately I needed them and pull away. I wasn't always wrong. All the while, Virginia Woolf was there beside me, going through very much the same thing, and I didn't even notice. All the while, Virginia Woolf was there beside me, going through very much the same thing, and I didn't even notice. Here's the thing: Losing your mother when you're a preteen throws things off, developmentally. You remember her, but not enough to feel like you really knew her -- just enough to grasp how much you're missing. You never went through a teenage separation from her, so she exists in a state of perpetual perfection, if not semi-sainthood, as haloed to you as she was to your little-girl self.
Leave it to the BBC to store bits of Virginia Woolf's psyche for us mere mortals to sift through on a whim. The broadcast of Woolf's essay, "Craftsmanship, " was first heard on April 20, 1937. Five years later, it was published in a book called "The Death of the Moth, and other essays, " the year after she walked into the Ouse River with rocks in her pockets. In "Craftsmanship, " Woolf insists that "words never make anything useful" and "tell nothing but the truth, " contradicting both meanings of "craft" in the dictionary. She says that words "hate being useful, that it is their nature not to express one simple statement but a thousand possibilities…" Further into the essay, she says that "a useful statement is a statement that can mean only one thing. And it is the nature of words to mean many things. " Hence, words combined into statements cannot be useful. Writing is not useful. Should I just end my life now? Well! Now that I am a bit bloodied, Woolf turns her attention to the teaching of writing: "Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing.