Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” and the Art of Digressive Passage

Unexpectedly, out of nowhere, dead for a dozen years, my mother hovers somewhere near and speaks. Or I read a story in the paper and enter a family’s grief so completely I have to pull out a hanky. Sometimes a chance encounter transports me to a place as real as the bus I’m on. A man with a waxed handlebar moustache drags his bad leg onto the #18, jabs his cane in my direction and, though there are plenty of empty seats, barks at me to move. In a flash, I see as vividly as I see him sitting next to me the bitter, dark corner of a tiny apartment where he sits of an evening and hates the world.

I’m too modern to be a proper animist, but these mental emanations make me feel akin to those who live among the speaking dead, the animating spirits of ostriches and elms, the hot living breath of the imagined and the dreamed. Even now, as I type these words, I look out my study window and see the jasmine-covered fence through a screen of light rain. But over in some phantasmal region of the plum tree, I also see a great horned auroch outlined in charcoal, its bull-like body, freckled face, and long, curving horns lifted from the cave walls of Lascaux. And I often sense the presence of myself at 25 or 30 or 16, the many selves who trail in the wake of my days and never age or change.

Virginia Woolf’s writing has been a part of my life for so long I no longer know if it taught me to see the world this way or just taught me to notice that I do. I do remember that when I first encountered To the Lighthouse in graduate school—a late start, it seemed to me then—I thought, yes, that’s what it means to be alive. To swim in a fluid sea of time, where past and present roll on like waves, lapping, overlapping, all intermingling, and equally alive; where stories emanate from objects; and the imagined is as vividly there as the stone you kick down the road, the voices of poets as audible in the fabric of present thought as a clanking of pots from the kitchen. Where the self is multiple, ineffable, unbounded by measurable time.

When I first discovered Woolf, I was just finding my way into an intellectual life, thrilled by graduate school seminars in Spenser or Modernism or Blake, but rolling my eyes at the posturing of peers whose theories and abstractions seemed untethered to the world. After classes, while they carried on about Derrida over beers, I rushed to fetch my three-year-old daughter from her nearby preschool, ride the bus home as we talked about her day, retrieve my one-year-old from her babysitter, and plunge into another life. Home meant sweet, exhausting hours filled with monkey bars and mud pies, stories and tears, talking and singing, bathing, feeding, pulling up socks, picking up Legos, and teaching about caterpillars and how to tie a shoe. At night we snuggled like puppies in a pile to read The Maggie B for the fiftieth time before kisses and turning out the light.

I loved that life of intimate physicality and nurture. But I also kept it secret from my peers and professors at school. There seemed such disdain in the academy, or at least a lack of room, for the rich particularities of bodies and the lives of women with children. Then I met Mrs. Ramsay, who knitted stockings while her young son James sat at her feet cutting pictures out of the mail-order catalogue, and Lily Briscoe, who painted; both of them felt the daily condescending blows of men like Mr. Ramsay, whose life of the mind had nothing to do with stockings or children or paintbrushes, and who felt himself superior to women and their ways of thinking and meeting the world. Woolf became my model of resistance.

Eventually I discovered her...