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November 29, 2024
from “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”
in Street Haunting and Other Essays
by Virginia Woolf
“Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to...put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.”—Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was an English writer known primarily for pioneering the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device in novels, but she was also an essayist with an eye for the telling detail. “Street Haunting” likens an errand in the city of London to an escape from her own life down “those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men.”
The Humble Essayist takes off the month of December so this is our last feature of the year, but we will be back on January 10. Until then we will leave Virginia Woolf’s winter adventure in place. Enjoy the holidays.
The Paragraph of the Week
During these minutes in which a ghost had been sought for, a quarrel composed, and a pencil bought, the streets had become completely empty. Life had withdrawn to the top floor, and lamps were lit. The pavement was dry and hard; the road was of hammered silver. Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer's shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?
—Virginia Woolf
Commentary
“Look at that! Look at that!” says the dwarf in Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” whose face wore a “peevish” expression when she entered the boot shop but suddenly brightened with pride “as she thrust her foot out, for behold it was the shapely, perfectly proportioned foot of a well–grown woman. It was arched; it was aristocratic. Her whole manner changed as she looked at it resting on the stand.” On a mission to buy a pencil, Woolf haunted the streets of London in winter like a ghost on “the greatest of adventures,” entering into the lives of others. She meets “Two bearded men, brothers, apparently, stone–blind, supporting themselves by resting a hand on the head of a small boy between them, and as they passed, holding straight on, the little convoy seemed to cleave asunder the passers–by with the momentum of its silence, its directness, its disaster.” She finds homeless including the “humped body of an old woman flung abandoned on the step of a public building with a cloak over her like the hasty covering thrown over a dead horse or donkey” who “lie not a stone’s throw from the sequined cloaks and bright legs of diners and dancers” on their way to a party at the Mayfield mansion where sofas “are supported by the gilt necks of proud swans; tables inlaid with baskets of many colored fruit; sideboards paved with green marble the better to support the weight of boars’ heads; and carpets so softened with age that their carnations have almost vanished in a pale green sea.” At last she arrives at the stationer’s shop where the quarreling owners were a couple who in the process of finding the box of pencils—“A pencil, a pencil,” the husband repeated, “certainly, certainly”—calm down: “their heat was going down, their anger disappearing.”
—THE
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