Recovering Your Story by Arnold Weinstein

Author:Arnold Weinstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307431677
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

UNFOLDING OUR PAST

At the end of To the Lighthouse, Woolf’s great novel about life, death, memory, and art, Lily Briscoe, trying to re-create via her painting the lost Mrs. Ramsay, affirms that she is not “inventing,” but rather “she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up” (295). It is, I think, a very beautiful, very domestic image of what life actually gives us, and how we may go about processing it, years or perhaps decades later. Despite the risk of appearing overly precious and recherché, Woolf’s image of our past lying enfolded, embedded in some kind of handkerchief or shawl or sweater that we have had forever (but have never gotten around to unfolding it, opening it), is a severe metaphor, because it implies that we have all our treasures within reach, within ourselves, but may nonetheless come to the end of our lives without accessing them. And I think that this haunting novel also suggests that the most beautiful things in our lives are lodged in us in this way, far back and folded up, but that they cannot be possessed when they happen to us, and hence the passing of time (and its messenger of death) is the required price for recovery and possession.

An austere lesson, it might seem, and yet one that makes increasing sense to me as I grow older, as I realize that life’s perhaps most arduous challenge is to possess more of one’s own estate, of one’s own past, both as elusive as quicksilver, as enigmatic as a foreign script, yet no less echoing for all that. How much, one wonders, lies buried and folded up within us, unprocessed and unreachable? How much has never risen to the light of day, so that its fuller colors and human density might at last be seen, measured, and possessed? And there is nothing antiquarian or merely curious here: On the contrary, these are the elemental notes, the fundamental indices to who we are, how we have lived.

A folded handkerchief, a folded shawl: Are these not also texts, surfaces that life has written on, demanding, themselves, to be brought to the surface so they can at last be opened up and read? It scarcely seems metaphoric to suggest that such hidden texts contain our innermost story. Yet, as To the Lighthouse will show, this intimate personal script is also wonderfully social and relational, for the lives of others—our parents, our loved ones, our long-ago and faraway exchanges with them—are also woven into this fabric, are also recoverable. In reading Virginia Woolf’s work, we enter into a luminous and textured world, as if that infolded handkerchief were akin to the magic handkerchief that Othello gave to Desdemona, a crisscrossing of lives and fates that is rich in feeling, that recasts our story as an affair of intersecting threads and voices.

For these reasons it does not seem amiss for me to start with my own encounter with To the Lighthouse, a

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