Friday, July 17, 2015

Floating shallops of flowers: July 17, 2015

Through his half-opened eyes he saw hands holding flowers --thin hands, fine hands; but hands that belonged to no one.  And were they flowers the hands held? Or mountains?  Blue mountains with violet shadows?  Then petals fell. Pink, yellow, white, with violet shadows, the fowers fell.  . . . The hands went on picking up flower after flower; that was a white rose; that was a yellow rose; that was a rose with violet valleys in its petals.  There they hung, many folded, many coloured, drooping over the rim of the bowl.  And petals fell. There they lay, violet and yellow, little shallops, boats on a river.  And he was floating, and drifting in a shallop, on  petal, down a river into silence, into solitude. . .
The Years (402)


On July 17, 1935, Woolf recorded finishing her "first wild retyping" of the MS of The Years,  so "tired in the head" that she wanted "simply to sit on a bank and throw stones" (D4 332)

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