A Passage, A Letter, A Story

A letter placed by the side of another, then perhaps another, and another, nudging each other, to form a word, a single word, leading on to perhaps a whole string of them like charms on a bracelet. A passage, a letter, a story. Mere tangles of words, the string played with over and over; the knots grow tighter, the string plays with another similar, different coloured, ball. Inarticulate, ridiculous, unprintable. Better never to have been written at all. But ah! freedom; the freedom of letters placed side by side. A mere outcry; a wild outburst. A flight; a shout, that echoes, echoes, echoes... nonsense; and again trails off, dot, dot, dot. Silence. How still the self, the voice has become. How still the world...but no! There is noise. A bird discoursing to itself or another; the sound of a train running over the tracks Sutton-here-I-come, Sutton-I-come; the constant hum of an air conditioner, one long exhale. People, animals, objects going about their lives.
The self, paused, once more pipes up. 'But', just as the narrator of An Unwritten Novel also asks, 'when the self speaks to self, who is speaking? - the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world – a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.'
Up and down, up, down...
Yes, the self muses, a coward; and no beauty, except perhaps in lantern-light. A rare light to be sure. Worshipping things, soft living things and hard solid things with its softening light. All sharp angles gone. All marks covered.
The mind, under this dimmed light, no less quick in thought but absent-minded in action. A book placed where an empty cup should have been left, an empty cup where the book should be. A set of pyjamas moved back to where they've just been moved from, then moved again to where they should be; and joining in the doing, therefore, all pleasant and disagreeable thought, that no crack in the paintwork or mark on the wall, even if seen and looked at, could put a full stop to.

Picture credit: Lantern and Flashlight, Dan Witz (source: WikiArt).

Quote from An Unwritten Novel by Virginia Woolf. See Selected Short Stories, Penguin Classics.

Journal entry, September 2021.