Summer Reading Lit

September 6th, 2014: Entry #1

“So he was deserted. The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself, for our sakes. But why should he kill himself for their sakes? Food was pleasant; the sun hot; and this killing oneself, how one set about it, with a table knife, uglily, with floods of blood, by sucking a gaspipe? He was too weak; he could scarcely raise his hand. Besides, now that he was quite alone, condemned, deserted, as those who are about to die are alone, there was a luxury in it, an isolation full of sublimity; a freedom which the attached can never know. Holmes had won of course; the brute with the red nostrils had won. But even Holmes himself could not touch this last relic straying on the edge of the world, this outcast, who gazed back at the inhabited regions, who lay, like a drowned sailor, on the shore of the world.” (Woolf 92-93)

Septimus is suffering from shell shock and depression, left trying to process what all of the atrocities he saw on the battlefield were committed in the name of. Clarissa and Peter Walsh gladly accept the nobility in English tradition, but Septimus feels alone in his worldview. His wife has just told him that she likes the doctor he hates, who is obsessed with fixing Septimus’s “imbalance.” Woolf writes about the thoughts of a suicidal person as only someone with personal experience could. Septimus feels completely isolated and his casual consideration of killing himself “for their sakes” is haunting both to readers who have not been suicidal and those who have. Septimus’s simile comparing himself to a drowned sailor gazing at the inhabited regions from the shore displays Woolf’s own experiences with depression and feelings of isolation while painting a picture of those feeling for readers who are unfamiliar.

September 6th, 2014: Entry #2

“But to go deeper, beneath what people said (and these judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!) in her own mind now, what did it mean to her, this thing...