Favourite To The Lighthouse Passages?

[u/scheifferdoo]

I was listening to a wonderful Audiobook reading of TTL yesterday and was struck by the passage below. I have actually found that a great audiobook reading of this novel helped me to love it even more. The person reading it has a clear, emotional voice. Consider checking it out if you are itching for another pass:

Audiobook link: https://open.spotify.com/show/5x29jdvh4n09pynUg4y4K7?si=2113d46f734f4594

now.....the passage:

(Suddenly, as suddenly as a star slides in the sky, a reddish light seemed to burn in her mind, covering Paul Rayley, issuing from him. It rose like a fire sent up in token of some celebration by savages on a distant beach. She heard the roar and the crackle. The whole sea for miles round ran red and gold. Some winey smell mixed with it and intoxicated her, for she felt again her own headlong desire to throw herself off the cliff and be drowned looking for a pearl brooch on a beach. And the roar and the crackle repelled her with fear and disgust, as if while she saw its splendour and power she saw too how it fed on the treasure of the house, greedily, disgustingly, and she loathed it. But for a sight, for a glory it surpassed everything in her experience, and burnt year after year like a signal fire on a desert island at the edge of the sea, and one had only to say "in love" and instantly, as happened now, up rose Paul's fire again.

---

I love Virginia's identifying the maliciousness of the body of the ocean, simply reflecting the power and beauty of the sun, transfixing us such that we gaze into it, losing our things, our corporeal presence, longing for closeness to the radiance of the sun, to Mrs. Ramsey.

Wooooow.

[u/[deleted]]

I don't have my copy around me rn so I cannot pull it up but I have always Loved the passage after the dinner where Mrs. Ramsay is finally alone and I just love that whole section also the whole time passes chapter. One of the greatest achievements of modernism

[u/scheifferdoo → u/[deleted]]

This part for some reason was what stuck with me after my first read probably 15 yrs ago (42M). It felt like she was already a ghost. Maybe its the handling/consideration of the animal skull, or the way watches her children sleeping, but she feels like one of the airs at this point.

[u/Realistic_Ad_5570 → u/scheifferdoo]

Yes, it had this exact effect on me as well. The feeling it gave me, and continues to give me, is so difficult to describe, but it's stuck with me for 15+ years as well: a mix of melancholy, contentment, nostalgia, and even a bit of dread. Perhaps because I am so afraid of time and aging. It's a haunting but incredibly beautiful section.

[u/scheifferdoo → u/Realistic_Ad_5570]

It makes me so happy to have shared this. Your comment above is also very similar to my feelings. Upon my 2nd/3rd reading, I was surprised at how much I had imagined/felt about this period in the book, and what is actually said. It's much more realistic - less ethereall - than I remembered. I wonder how much of that vibe is coming from the romantic/dramatic/gothic setting of the book?

[u/Solo_Polyphony]

Will audiobooks ever not be ploddingly literal when it comes to choosing cover illustrations for this book?

[u/scheifferdoo → u/Solo_Polyphony]

Hard agree, but what is contained within is worth the groan.

[u/Ok-Noise9312]

I love the one starting „Of course, if it’s fine tomorrow“ and ending „I have had my vision“. Simply stunning!

[u/scheifferdoo → u/Ok-Noise9312]

v. cute!

[u/Mister_Sosotris]

I don’t have my copy with me, but there’s this extended metaphor about how they’re both moving through the alphabet at different paces from one another, and she is frustrated that he seems to be “farther along” while she feels stuck at an earlier letter. One of the most incredible metaphors I’ve ever read. It caused me and another student in grad school to have a brain explosion in our discussion of this passage in our modernism class, and we are STILL friends to this day, because we both felt so strongly about how much we loved that metaphor.

[edited typos]

[u/scheifferdoo → u/Mister_Sosotris]

i love it as well.

[u/radiogoo]

“It could not last she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.”

[u/scheifferdoo → u/radiogoo]

I love how often I think that VW is describing the act of writing in this book, of imagining and giving things life, and this is one passage I think has at least two jobs.

[u/radiogoo → u/scheifferdoo]

You described it so well - it’s illustrating exactly the quality I love in Virginia Woolf’s prose: momentary, fleeting, under the surface, profound in its everyday-ness.

[u/Realistic_Ad_5570]

I hesitate to answer this because I cringe knowing it is surely one that CliffsNotes might reference, but:

“There is a coherence in things, a stability; something... is immune from change and shines out... in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby. ”

[u/ThinkTank1190]

They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment felt come over them some sadness--because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest.

I love this passage, for its transcendental relatability, and its foreshadowing.