Literary Lacunae
I seem to be missing significant bits from my early 20th Century vocabulary, or rather, cultural knowledge.
I know what "bringing out your girls" means and Woolf lets one of her salon ladies teach us that there is no greater delight than "taking tea" but I fail to imagine what the two activities crossed (right & below) mean. Can anybody help me?
Woolf is becoming easier book by book. I started a bit back to front with her oeuvre. Some authors you can only read entirely if chronologically. There are great pauses between my Woolfs, while I contemplate what there is to appreciate in her long-suffering.
Maybe her later work is better grasped after her earlier work. For even Mrs. Dalloway or To The Lighthouse never seemed that radically conscious to me. But against this more Fosterian novel "The Voyage Out" a progression is - of course, now I see - marked and quite a literary feat. I was too quickly already comparing Mrs Woolf to one of us. She comes from the days, however, when girls were barely allowed to set one (visiting) foot on University grounds, or a hall, let alone read anything there.
Her essay addressing this inane inequality based on nothing but male chauvenism (in the same volume as "The Voyage Out" in my Wordsworth Classics edition), "A Room of One's Own" is not only euridite but musical, which is remarkably clever. Genius, probably. She might be embraced by the feminist or lesbienne community but her writer's mind was of that quality that makes one a writer for the soul, and holds the middle between masculine and feminine. The word masculine, the flow feminine.
Home School of Social Media
What do we all have to say to one another, that cannot be said in a book: one simple writing of one's life?
Is showing and telling the same as walking the Road? Does it pave the path with more meaningful mosaics?
The Tao.
Is all we need to read.
Is is everything between Alpha and Omega. The Tao-T-cross, and Ankh of the Egyptians. We find the T frame of the cruxiFIX (to quote @kimberlylane), with its crossbeam which keeps the outpoured energy of the divine source from the Logos (the Alpha, beginning) together.
Becoming Human
In the Son, the Life/the Way, we find the Work/the Word "volendeten Schöpfungswerke in völlig verwandelter Weise" (completed work of creation, fully transformed). (Otto Infeld, "Über die 7 Weihnachts-Zeichen Rudolf Steiners"). We travel towards this being, a state of Isness, from the Christmas manger to the Pentecostal AHA! of I Am.
We begin as Michaelic Man!
We open the Book, we lay the Tarot and read our lives into a Human Being.
The Omega of the rounded I: head planted firmly on two feet.
paved with you and me. With Gibbon and Balzac. But let us hop-scotch over Gibbon and not count in all of Balzac when it comes to taking up a book.
After I have left here,
I return to me, myself and I and this experience will roll up into a dance where we have turned round and round to the screech of a fiddle. We have said pretty things under conditions for which there was no reason. I shall return to my industry lying all around me, like Uncle Ridley, who is adamant that if you know Greek there is no other reading than the Greeks to be getting on with. The rest is a waste of time, according to this classicist.
Of course, Woolf cannot agree, and her pen scratches on. But she lost hope, too, in the end, in the lake, with stones in her pockets. Wilful drowning is like reading, which all writing becomes once the nib falls silent. The kind of reading that remains Greek....