But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a **** crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.
It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.
The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Quark
"It's so mysterious, the land of tears." 
Mrs. Ramsey does survive in the hearts of those she touched and in her surviving children. In our struggle to overcome the power of nature to wipe out life, marriage and children are the means of fighting the destructing forces that Woolf sees nature as. I'll post right after this something on the middle section. But Mrs. R is portrayed as a fertility goddess. Here chapter 7 of the first part:
I am an engineer you know) that states that nature evolves to chaos and disorder. I'm fairly confident that Woolf is specifically thinking of entropy. It was something discussed in her day and the dramatisation describes it perfectly, even the concept of rusting. From Merriam-Webster: entropy: "2 a : the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity b : a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder." Second, that middle paragraph I quoted lifts the conflict into a devine level. Entropy, the forces of destruction, is from God himself, and the human toil is Mrs. R's fight. (Remember this passage from chapter 10 of part I: "A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.") 
Ok I guess we disagree. 
Ratz... I hit the wrong button! 