Pilgrimage to St. Ives

Nothing that we had as children was quite so important to us as our summer in Cornwall.

—Virginia Woolf

THERE is a coherence in things, a stability; something . . . is immune from change, and shines out . . . in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral—. Five hours after leaving London, the small, bright blue train pulls into the station of St. Ives, and I gaze at the narrow slate and granite houses tucked into this steeply built port town founded in the thirteenth century. The day is overcast, and in this light the sea is the meditative blue of medieval paintings. In the far distance I can just make out a cluster of boats in the harbor. I cannot say if any are fishing boats, though St. Ives finds its origins in the pilchard fishing that diminished only at the end of the nineteenth century.

I gather up my luggage and remind myself that I should harbor no illusions about stepping into the landscape that Virginia Woolf—Virginia Stephen then—knew as a girl. All too familiar with the ways in which Walmart and McDonald’s now pockmark the American landscape, I try to accept that the twenty-first century will inevitably have marked this Cornish town on “the very toenail of England,” as Virginia’s father called St. Ives; a town built between the safe haven of the harbor and the more volatile Atlantic; a town named for the fifth-century princess and spiritual missionary la, who is said to have set sail across the Irish Sea on a leaf that grew in size to become a boat.

And yet, having never been to this part of England and knowing virtually nothing about its customs, beyond the fact that it is renowned for its surfing (“the best in Europe”), cream teas, and birdlife, it is somewhat inevitable that the picture of St. Ives I continue to carry is infused with the lyricism of Virginia Woolf, in particular with To the Lighthouse, the novel she wrote to lay to rest the memory of her mother—“the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood”: “When it was written,” Woolf writes in her diary, “I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.”

This novel about changing perceptions—about the impossibility of pinning anything down—is the one I have read more than any other, seven times in all. Six years ago, I read To the Lighthouse yet again over a weekend during the first weeks of my pregnancy with my daughter Sophie, not knowing then that the nausea, headache, and fatigue I experienced were typical of the first trimester’s profound changes—not a flu or infection. There is a peculiar aptness, I think now—a synchronicity—in the fact that I am journeying to St. Ives in the early weeks of a second pregnancy that has been more than three years in coming. It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to spread over the world and become part of the human gain. Such is the painter Lily Briscoe’s meditation on a world at the center of which is Mrs. Ramsay, the woman and mother who is the focus of Lily’s painting, a focus that occupies much of the novel’s journey.

On the train, rereading pages covered with decades’ old notes and highlights, I felt like a pilgrim drawing near the holy land, a feeling intensified by my first vision of the town surrounded by sun-bleached sand and gray-blue sea through the train windows. Even so I would be a fool to expect St. Ives to remain unchanged. Woolf herself lived at a time of radical, all too violent change—two world wars, the growing disparity between poor and rich, the breakdown of communities that accompanied an increasingly urban industrialized England.

At the same time what I’ve come to understand are the ways...