After The Waves

She died today 70 years ago. The suicide note to her husband shows how much Virginia Woolf valued life; the breakdowns were punctuation marks:

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

A happy person wanting to end all the happiness? Did she not tell Leonard when they were courting, “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no attraction in you. There are moments – when you kissed me the other day was one – when I feel no more than a rock.”

Are these contradictions or merely momentary feelings that pass when sensitive people have to deal with their own inner worlds? Maybe she enjoyed feeling like a rock, a woman in denial who wished to not be attracted to anyone, to anything, to curl up inside herself and die already.

And wasn’t it her madness that made her write with such spontaneous frenzy? Isn’t stream of consciousness really about probing every pore of your mind and awakening every sleeping cell? I will not analyse her, but those voices she heard can be described in so many ways as the conscience, the rumblings of curiosity, the insatiable thirst for more.

“Everything has gone from me,” she wrote. There must have been those many things, then…they went away and she followed.