To the Lighthouse

1. The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton
2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
3. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
4. Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
5. Sideways, Rex Pickett
6. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
7. Le Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory
8. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
9. The Sonnets, William Shakespeare
10. To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Really liked it. I think a lot of the modern fiction I've really enjoyed (Douglas Coupland, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan) owes a huge debt to it (and maybe Woolf in general, if all her stuff is like that) in that the focus always seems to be on all the things left unsaid between people, the little resentments and fears that lead to ever-growing chasms until one day you wake up and you realize you haven't talked to so-and-so in 6 years and what are they up to? Or even worse, they're still in your life and you hate them, but you don't know why, or you are completely ambivalent to them because you have no idea who they are, nor do you know how to start a simple conversation and get to know them again. For me, it's really that last one that hits home, because that's the way I feel about my family. They're a part of me, they're my flesh and blood and yet I feel like I don't know them at all. Or maybe, as Tan says, I do know them, know them intimately, because they are me; they helped make me who I am today, after all.

So much is always left unsaid, left in that grey area between actions and intentions.

The other side of that, and something that's illustrated in Lighthouse, is the joy that can be found in a relationship where things don't always need to be said. There's this brilliant passage between the Ramsays where the wife knows exactly what the husband wants and wants to give it to him because she loves him, but doesn't want to actually do it - why? Not out of pride, I don't think. There are plenty of times when her submissiveness towards him is made clear. I think it has to do with why they love each other in the first place; I think her spirit, her strength is part of what draws him to her, and also what makes it all the more important that she submit to him. Maybe verbalizing the sentiment cheapens it somehow, makes it seem less sincere. In the end it's communicated through looks and body language: he's content because he knows she loves him, she's content because she didn't have to verbalize it.

I miss that. I miss it a lot. I miss being able to know how the woman I'm in love with feels just by looking at her, I miss knowing she knows I'm upset by the way she squeezes my hand, I miss seeing all the little things that you get to see when people are unguarded around each other, the little vignettes that become the basis of your memories of a person. Some of this stuff might work its way into a little bit of writing I'm kicking around; the thought of a trip to a lighthouse has been a nice image for me since I started reading the book, but I wanted to finish it before I wrote anything.