“She thinks about Septimus and recognizes how factitious all her attempt to assemble and to connect has been. Her withdrawal from her party suggests that she has even in the midst of her guests kept untouched the privacy of her soul, that still point from which one can recognize the hollowness of the social world and feel the attraction of the death everyone carries within him as his deepest reality. Death is the place of true communion.”(Fiction and Repetition, J. Hillis Miller, pp 196)
this is so true and so beautiful. Mrs. Dalloway is now one of my favorite novels. I've been slaving away over this paper on it for a while and have struggled a lot with how to say what I want to convey about the text in a way that does remote justice to how i feel about it. I sort of wish I could get away with saying: "this is truth." because, well, it is. it's painfully truthful in that it conveys all those frailties about getting older and about how sometimes it's these certain moments that flitter in and out of your day to day life that support or deconstruct your current experience.
it's hard to say. also, i wonder if you're supposed to say it. like, i think that i couldn't explain how all these things just seem to move me in just the right way and how it's painful to read certain things because i just believe so much in the truth of them, and no matter how much i want to share that it never comes out right: it's just as ridiculous as preaching or whatever have you. it's ridiculous, but i constantly want to explore it and force other people to explore it. but instead i think i just end up sounding insane or tragedy-obsessed. but maybe i am both of those things?
