July 18, 2013 - Walk In Your Own Shoes
From Virginia Woolf’s biography ….
“Virginia was a sane woman who had an illness. She was often a patient, but she was not a victim. She was not weak, or hysterical, or self-deluding, or guilty, or oppressed. On the contrary, she was a person of exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism, who made the best use she could, and came to the deepest understanding possible to her, of her own condition. She endured, periodically, great agony of mind and severe physical pain, with remarkably little self-pity.
She frequently uses the word ‘apprehensive’ to describe her states of mind. The word is a crucial one: the awful fear which accompanied her breakdowns and the possibility of their recurrence can never be underestimated.
What is certain is her closeness, all her life, to a terrifying edge, and her creation of a language which faces it and makes something of it. This is a life of heroism, not of oppression, a life of writing wrestled from illness, fear and pain.”
Excerpt from biography ‘Virginia Woolf’ by Hermione Lee.
Reading …. ‘Intimacy’ by Ziyad Marar. Art by Edward Hopper titled, ‘Room in New York’ (1932).
“Contemporary society discourages intimacy. We live in a self-regarding culture, soaked through with the impersonal need for instant gratification. Our goal is to get intimate with ourselves rather than others, to identify and indulge in our own desires and fantasies (where do you want to go today?) and to satisfy them by consuming the right products. Success and the pursuit of status are trumpeted at the expense of human connection. Alongside the rise and rise of consumer culture we’ve experienced a technological revolution that replaces intimacy with simulation. The age of the internet has made us all feel more connected and yet, paradoxically, more distant. With so many relationships now mediated through screens we are beginning to appreciate the limitations of digital interactions as well as the virtues. As with our attitudes to that vanishing commodity, the physical book, we are treasuring those moments of face-to-face interaction with real people in actual rather than virtual environments.”
Her heart leapt so impossibly loud it stole her every sense .
But it was always the book, held preciously close to chest, that caught and consoled her misbehaving mind.
(Clunk & Jam book).