At the Lighthouse

Here it is – the continuation of my series of entries, where I comment on a particular piece of literature and a piece of music that reminds me of the month we’re in.

So, June, huh? Yeah, I remember June 2007. I turned in my paper on the lais of French medieval poet Marie de France, and the boyfriend and I went to Amsterdam and had a wonderful time there. It was a nice month.

The calm water of an Amsterdam canal on a beautiful June evening

…It was also THREE FREAKIN’ MONTHS AGO, for crying out loud! And I cannot believe I’ve come this far behind. Oh, well. I guess it’s never too late. And perhaps making my June entry at this time of the year will comfort me in my gloomy autumn mood.

My choice for the literary section of my calendary arts project is Mrs. Dalloway, or, rather, a specific part of it. This is hardly an innovative choice; Mrs. Dalloway takes place in June, one day in June, and revolves around a number of characters’ experience of this early summer day.“…For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh,; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass brands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.”

So reads one of the opening passages of Virginia Woolf’s novel. The above quote is told from middle-aged main character Clarissa Dalloway’s point of view, and it sets the premise for the rest of the novel, essentially this question (although I am certainly simplfying it here, now): In this life how is it possible to die?

Virginia Woolf

It’s impossible for me to single out a specific passage of this novel that I love more than the rest of it (although the above passage ranks high on my list of favourite literary quotes) – I love it all equally. I love all the characters, even the ones that annoy me (like the painfully recognizable Peter Walsh and his pathetic attempts at escape from inevitable path of life and death via an endless number of romantic detours with women), I love the slow pace of the story, and above all I love Woolf’s bubbling, lively, yet heavy and significant prose, and the flow of her stream of consciousness. But since this is to be my Literary June entry, I’ve chosen one passage that I find to be the most June-like of the novel: The description of Mrs. Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughert’s omnibus ride.

“And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well-cut clothes, it was beginning… People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lilies, and she had to got to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and the dogs.”

If March is the month of going out wearing too thin clothes and catching a cold accordingly, June is definitely the month of this: Of being young and attractive and with potential and to be receiving sappy compliments. Everything is blooming in June, the high school students graduate, and the comparison between the blossoming young ladies and the luscious lilacs emerging purple and white from the fences is so very corny, but it’s always made nevertheless. Woolf is obviously fully aware that the comparisons made in the above passage are pure kitsch: early dawn, fawns, and a random collection of botany (with the lily taking the prize as the most clichéd comparison for a virginal young girl), but it’s very authentic in as much as this is exactly the kind of imagery that surrounds a young girl.

This is how what June does to me, too, the same thing that a lovely, promising young woman will do to most people’s clichéd poetic streak. June is when I’m at my most sentimental, and I don’t even really try to fight it. I think of myself as at least somewhat cool and reflected, but June brings out my inner sappy-head. In June I ride my bike singing patriotic summer songs. In June I get misty-eyed over old family pictures. In June I cry openly upon seeing the silhouettes around the St. John’s Eve bonfire. I remember having a picnic with a girl friend around midsummer a couple of years ago, and as we were walking home in the bright summer evening, and the sky was all pastel-icious and the blackbirds were singing, I completely channelled Anne of Green Gables and exclaimed: “Oh! It’s summer now! It’s summer, and we’re young and alive!”, and I swear I came this close to hugging a damn birch tree, right there and then.

In short: June kills my inner critic and makes me childishly happy and sappily poetic. And I think if we have these tendencies within us, we should all let them loose in June.

/marie