To the Lighthouse

先引用一句话：对一个民族而言，缺失人文的科学是麻木的，缺失科学的人文是软弱的，双重缺失则是愚昧的。 Woolf的作品好难懂，意识流的都好难懂，基本没有情节，比如《到灯塔去》，如果非要说情节的话，就是一家人一开始去不成灯塔，后来Mrs.Ramsay去世，时隔十年，Mr.Ramsay带着小儿子James和女儿Cam去了灯塔，结束。总之风格很奇特。 Woolf生前好像很惨，遭受精神疾病的困扰，受到两个同母异父哥哥的性虐待，然后又是一位早早去世的作家，有才能的人都比较短命。小说分三部分，窗--时过境迁--到灯塔去，第一部分着墨最多。 Mr.Ramsay is not a social being or family type, needs to assert his own logic and order on what he sees as messy and unlikely. He doesn't want any one of his children to go along with something that feels unrealistic. So he denies the possibility of the trip; he casts a cold wet blanket over the activity and he says no. James的反应很极端，“Had there been an axe handy, or a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's head and killed him there and then, James would have seized it.”因为看不懂，我又借助了一些参考书。“Modern Fiction": The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will, but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccably that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being 'like this'. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions--trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of giglamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness in the end. another one:"But what have I done with my life?"thought Mrs Ramsay, taking her place at the head of the table, and looking at all the plates making white circles on it.'William, sit by me,'she said 'Lily,'she said wearily,'over there'...(this piece is also amusing.Literally, her wearines translates into seeing only the endless table with plates and cutlery--a very solid, concret, domestic example. And her husband is frowning, but she cannot see into his thoughts, and neither can we--but we can imagine some endless piece of self-related sorrow is troublig him--he cannot be a social being.)

到灯塔去，改天还得再读读，凭现在的我，理解不了。所以暂时先把比较有感觉的句子摘录在这里：

1.She stood quite motionless for a moment against a picture of Queen Victoria wearing the blue ribbon of the Garter(画面感太强了，仿佛电影一般)...With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets.

2.关乎画画方面的：

then beneath the colour there was the shape. she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment's flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passsage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.

It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling.

She hated playing at painting. A brush, the one dependable thing in a world of strife, ruin, chaos〞that one should not play with, knowingly even: she detested it.

before she exchanged the fluidity of life for the concentration of painting she had a few moments of nakedness when she seemed like an unborn soul, a soul reft of body, hesitating on some windy pinnacle and exposed without protection to all the blasts of

doubt. Why then did she do it?

3.How then did it work out, all this ?How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt or disliking? And to those worlds, what meaning attached, after all?

4.景物描写：

a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple.

Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had, she supposed, a place in the universe.

5.Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad.(只是因为织的袜子不合身，就。。无法理解)

6.To pursue truth with such astonishing lack the of consideration for other people's feelings, to rendthe thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bent her head as if to let the pelt of jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.There was nothing to be said.

7. She often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.

8.but made aware of the pettiness of some part of her, and of human relations, how flawed they are, how despicable, how self-seeking, at their best.

9.If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men?Is the lot of the average human being better now than in the time of the Pharaohs? is the lot of the average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?

10.It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say,"this is what I like" this is what I am;...why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.

11.how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

12.an unmarried woman has missed the best of life...oh, but, Lily would say, there was her father; her home; even, had she dared to say it, her painting. But all this seemed so little, so virginal, against the other.

13.Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?

14.What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object on dored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee.

15.it was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself.

16.she pitied men always as if they lacked something〞women never, as if they had something

17.What does one live for? Why, one asked oneself, does one take all these pains for the human race to go on? Is it so very desirable? Are we attractive as a species?

18.here is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby;

19.ut at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. So she saw them; she heard them; but whatever they said had also this quality, as if what they said was like the movement of a trout when, at the same time, one can see the ripple and the gravel, something to the right, something to the left; and the whole is held together; for whereas in active life she would be netting and separating one thing from another;

20.but it was all so mixed up with, Am I saying the right thing? Am I making a good impression? that, after all, one knew more about him than about Tolstoi, whereas, what Paul said was about the thing, simply, not himself, nothing else. Like all stupid people, he had a kind of modesty too, a consideration for what you were feeling, which, once in a way at least, she found attractive. Now he was thinking, not about himself, or about Tolstoi, but whether she was cold, whether she felt a draught, whether she would like a pear.

21.And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be, Are full of trees and changing leaves,

22.Perished. Alone

23.All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.

24.What is the meaning of life? That was all〞a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come

25.tyranny, despotism, he called it〞making people do what they did not want to do, cutting off their right to speak.

26.For there are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?

27. Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

28.One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with...fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought and 'Half one's notions of other people were after all grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.'