Back Garden: May 11, 2015

May 11, 1897

Father has taken up Dr. Seaton’s notion that I should be healthfully employed out of doors – as a lover of nature --& the back garden is to be reclaimed—that will be a truly gigantic work of genius – nevertheless we will try. 
(PA 84) 

Back Garden of 22 Hyde Park Gate, as viewed from upper window

Evening Primroses: May 10, 2015

Evening primroses among roses

Standing at the window and looking out into the garden, the lives of all these books filled the room behind with a soft murmur. Truly, a deep sea, the past, a tide which will overtake and overflow us. Yes, the tennis players looked half transparent already, as they came up the grass lawn to the house, the game being over. The tall lady stooped and picked a pallid rose; and the balls which the gentleman kept dancing up and down upon his racquet, as he walked beside her, were dim little spheres against the deep green hedge. Then, as they passed inside, the moths came out, the swift grey moths of the dusk, that only visit flowers for a second, never settling, but hanging an inch or two above the yellow of the evening primroses, vibrating to a blur.

-- "Reading"  (E3 150)  (CDB 165)

Marsh Farm: May 8, 2015

Farm below Monk's House

What could have been more secret, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stammering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horses standing at the gate neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and the gardens blowing irises and fritillaries?   Orlando  (238)

Paddington Butterfly: May 7, 2015

And so I was taken in a cab with George and Nessa to meet Thoby at Paddington.  It was sunset, and the great glass dome at the end of the station was blazing with light.  It was glowing yellow and red and the iron girders made a pattern across it.  I walked along the platform, gazing with rapture at this magnificent blaze of colour, and the train slowly steamed into the station.   "A Sketch of the Past" (MOB 93)

Paddington Train Station

She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.  (TTL 51)

Swans in the Water Meadows: May 6, 2015

Swans in the water meadows behind Monk's House

 



I walk in the afternoon down to the river.  All the world is breeding. The flies are going from grass to grass.  The flowers are thick with pollen.  The swans ride the stream in order.  The clouds warm now, sun-spotted, sweep over the hills, leaving gold in the water, and gold on the necks of the swans.     
(Susan)

The Waves  (71-2)

Moon Country: May 5, 2015

For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men. (TTL 16)

Julia Stephens, Woolf's mother, died May 5, 1895

To the Lighthouse was published May 5, 1927

Green: May 4, 2015

He was describing, as all young poets are forever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than/most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window.  After that, of course, he could write no more.  Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.  

 Orlando (13)

Wisteria: May 3, 2015

 



"Fireflies among the wisteria. . . . See how the great blossoms hang before us; vast chandeliers of gold and dim purple pendant from the skies.  Do you feel the fine gilt painting our thighs as we enter, and how the slate coloured walls flap clammily about us as we dart deeper and deeper into the petals or grow taut like drums?"
"The Evening Party" (CSF 97) 

Platforms of Time: May 2, 2015

2nd May . . . I write the date, because I think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes.  That is, to make them include the present -- at least enough of the present to serve as platform to stand upon.  It would be interesting to make the two people, I now, I then, come out in contrast.  And further, this past is much affected by the present time.  What I write today I should not write in a year's time. But I cannot work this out; it had better be left to chance.

"A Sketch of the Past" 1939 (MOB 75)

Talland House Ghosts (digital composition)

May Day: May 1, 2015

London Chestnuts in May bloom

The tree bowing, the grey spires soft in the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air, the springy air of May, the elastic air with its particles – chestnut bloom, pollen, whatever it is that gives May air its potency, blurring the trees, gumming the buds, daubing the green. 
  

Jacob's Room (35)