A Book’s Greatest Compliment

I think the greatest compliment one can pay a book is to want to read it again. I doubt I can ever shed Eliot’s Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—or, more contemporary, Pullman’s The Dark Materials.

You know me as loving anything by Virginia Woolf: a summer day of floating clouds in sea of blue, daisies blooming at my feet; a tranquil sojourn in the shade of a leafy maple, my back propped against its furrowed bark, To the Lighthouse in my hands.

A momentary escape from a troubled world of tribal factions…

How can I not enter into character Lily Briscoe’s insightful awareness of art’s ability to unify experience and grant it meaning?

“She could see it so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.”

And then the question that hovers over all our lives:

“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

The artist’s struggle to render visible her inner contemplations—it’s all there. Those rare moments when the gates of mystery yield, and we glimpse the whole.

As Lily exclaims in triumph and exhaustion:

“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Great artistry helps us find our own vision, makes us more aware, and doing so, lends nurturance for living our lives better.

And so it is for me with To the Lighthouse: like a well-brewed tea, to be sipped slowly, savored, drunk down to the very lees.

—rj