Letter from a Friend #2: Kathleen Leeper on Virginia Woolf and the Vindication of Existence
Here is the next edition of a letter from a friend! The first time Kat came over for dinner, they bicycled home with a foot-high stack of books from our library, including Mrs. Dalloway. In the year and change since that dinner party, Kat has borrowed (and read!) at least a couple of yards worth of books from me and come over for dinner a BUNCH more times. They're a scientist by training, care a lot about wilderness, ethics, and fan fiction and I am really, really excited to get to share their writing with you.
I don’t believe in god or God or anything outside the collective human experience, and yet I keep wanting to say, somehow, this: I think Virginia Woolf is divine. I’ve been writing essays and stories and letters and talking about her for a year, compulsively, since I read Mrs. Dalloway in March of 2018. Divine: I can’t produce any other word for an experience that feels so tremblingly sincere, for passages that make me weak in the knees, for writing that makes me feel like a supplicant at some nameless wellspring.
But then: divine, really? I know very well it is her fundamental humanity that I prize in her work, that brings me to tears. The entire Woolfian project is not some Sisyphean attempt at godliness, but instead merely the hard and desperate and never-ending work of reaching out to make human contact, to touch somebody else, for a single moment. Not a hint of divinity, in the sense I’ve always thought it.
Lots of people have read Virginia Woolf in the past hundred years; not all of them have ended up twisted up in knots. I think my experience is not uncommon, though, of falling headfirst into a delirious and often-inarticulate mania. It becomes an obsession with the sense of reading Woolf. She is like kindling a lamp in every shadowed place; she is like rising water, seeping under closed doors, every single bit and bob floating quietly to the surface; she is like the impossibly tangled root systems of a forest. Each moment of a person becoming not necessarily beautiful, but laden with a careful and impartial attention.
It’s possible, of course, this is just a reaction to the prosaic fact that reading Woolf is overlaid on a year of tremendous loss and fear in every domain of my life: parents, friends, mentors, homes, careers. Like Clarissa, I “had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.” And it was, as the change swept in, tide after tide. But in recognizing that danger as my own, I also had to recognize myself as Clarissa — as Peter, as Septimus, as Bernard and Rhoda and Rachel and Evelyn and Mrs. Ramsay and Lily — witnessing tremendous moments of selfhood, deserving of careful attention. It was a forceful acknowledging of one’s—my— profundity, my own capability to be. That feels, to me, more godly than anything else: to be reminded of my own humanity in the mirror.
Alejandra never fails to send me home from drinks with less than five books, poetry and essays and fiction. (It is, you might imagine, a brilliant and months-long reading list.) One of these was Thomas Merton’s Raids on the Unspeakable and he, as it turns out, has already said what I have spilled so much digital ink for: this reclamation of meaning, of the self. The only difference is that Merton said it about God. In “Prometheus: A Meditation”, he plays on Prometheus’ struggle for mankind and his subsequent eternal punishment to explore the lure of idolatry, why men might worship gods over God.
The Promethean instinct is as deep as man’s weakness: that is to say, it is almost infinite. Promethean despair is the cry that arises out of the abyss of man’s nothingness—the inarticulate expression of the terror man cannot face, the terror of having to be someone, of having to be himself. That is to say, his terror of facing and fully realizing his divine sonship, in Christ, and in the Spirit of Fire Who is given us from heaven. The fire Prometheus thought he had to steal from the gods is his own identity in God, the affirmation and vindication of his own being as a sanctified creature in the image of God. The fire Prometheus thought he had to steal was his own spiritual freedom. In the eyes of Prometheus, to be himself was to be guilty.
I found myself crying on the couch, and recognizing, achingly, that feeling, the “terror of facing and fully realizing [my] divine sonship”. It’s a belief that vindication of my existence has to be stolen rather than made, stolen rather than inherent.
But why do I recognize it as if I’m perhaps, finally, standing outside of it? And I remembered Woolf, and I thought that maybe this, here, was an avenue to understanding: not that she is divine alone, but rather that the rest of us might be. She might bring us water in the desert, thrust light into darkness, but someone has to be there to be lit, to be rescued from thirst. The divinity of rescue matched by a divinity of being rescued; one does not exist without the other.
This new legibility of self, this self that can be sanctified, also opens the door to real and tangible responsibilities. If I am capable of realizing a divine sonship in the way that Woolf and Merton make me believe I am, then I have to do that in all the ways I know how. And I am terrified of that: of messing up, of doing it wrong. Hold back, learn more, know more before you dare go outside. But looking at the very particular me-ness, holding on to that particular personal profundity that floats to the top of the water, means looking at the realization that if I don’t say the things I see and feel and love, they will never get said. I can be queer in Yosemite; I can hold scientists accountable; I can be there for 9 year olds to tell me what it means to them that I exist. I can reinforce the fabric that holds us all together, that divine humanity of Woolf’s. Without my attention, without me, some measure of the world’s beauty and potential and possibility will be overrun by the overwhelming noise and lost in real, tangible ways. If I can be given water, then I can bring water. And who else will shape the world, if I do not?
Kat Leeper was born in New Jersey and does science for a living. Follow them on Twitter at @felinejumper
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