Prose, Oh Such Prose!

Reading can both lead to and be magic at times, the kind of magic that comes from such a gifted writer as Virginia Woolf. I promised more to come from her. It is come, and again from her 1928 novel entitled “Orlando.”

Orlando has been working on a precious manuscript for 300 years, which she carries near at hand in the bosom of her dress. She has, after an earlier, magical, weeklong, deep sleep, been transformed and is living as a young woman. The title of the precious manuscript is “The Oak Tree, A Poem.” It has suffered one considerable rewrite after another over centuries, a very trying task for Orlando, a learning experience, but one of determination.

The finally finished work is ready for readership. In a following sequence of events, so says Nicholas Greene, her severe literary critic of earliest years.

Orlando knows it is ready for readership even before his blessing: “At this moment, but only just in time to save the book from extinction, Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, ‘Done!”’

Virginia Woolf is having her say about authorship and readership, and Orlando’s quest to know what the spectacle of life is. On that matter, the following passage from Chapter six is one of the most beautiful on any printed page. It must be shared.

“Such was the intensity of her feelings that she could even imagine that she had suffered dissolution, and perhaps some faintness actually attacked her. For a moment she stood looking at the fair, indifferent spectacle [‘The world was going on as usual.’] with staring eyes. At length she was revived in a singular way. The manuscript which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a living thing, and, what was still odder, and showed how fine a sympathy was between them, Orlando, by inclining her head, could make out what it was that it was saying. It wanted to be read. It must be read. It would die in her bosom if it were not read. For the first time in her life she turned with violence against nature. Elk-hounds and rose bushes were about her in profusion. But elk-hounds and rose bushes can none of them read. It is a lamentable oversight on the part of Providence which had never struck her before. Human beings alone are thus gifted. Human beings had become necessary. She rang the bell. She ordered the carriage to take her to London at once.”

But arriving by new-to-Victorian-age steam locomotive in London, “Each man and each woman was bent on his own affairs. And where was she to go?” That is when a physically changed Nick Greene suddenly appears, and affirms her manuscript’s rise to the level of the classics. It must now be given full life and be read. “It must, of course, be published instantly.” After 300 weighted years! So, “there was nothing for it but to submit to what was evidently his wish and the fervent desire of the poem itself.”

This is what writing and reading are about: the intensity of writing; the joy of reading. Virginia Woolf said it best!

But what I must add: Thank you all for being my readers, and thank you, too, Penn-Franklin News, always a Library best friend!