{EN} To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

1. „Indeed he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf and dumb to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s. His understandings often astonished her.”

2. „What does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species? Not so very, he thought (…). Foolish questions, vain questions, questions one never asked if one was occupied. Is human life this? Is human life that? One never had time to think about it. (…) friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”

3. „And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which traversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years The great relelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”

4. „The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the objects inches too low. Then one gave it up; then the idea sank back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension. For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? (…) It was one’s body feeling, not one’s mind. (…) To want and not to have sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have – to want and want – how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

5. „Old antagonist, life.”

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