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ericcoliu

Reading, Writing, and Life on the Page

A River Runs Through It

As the heat mirages on the river
in front of me danced with and
through each other, I could feel
patterns of my own life joining with
them. It was here, ...
... I started this story ... 1

Life is flowing on like a river, sometimes with murmurs, sometimes bending this way or that. It is swift, oftentimes voiceless yet continuous. You couldn't re-live any moment of time past just as you can never step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on.

Every year at the time when the new year is in and the old out, I'm trying to make sense of what I was, and of how I am now. I've always believed my first duty to myself is to live my life to its fullest, but I've also been haunted by another conviction that everything is, by and large, either preordained or accidental. As I reflect on the past year, I seem to have charged through my life in a kind of panic, and looking back, I feel that I have achieved little of worth beyond my physical existence.

Today, I woke up earlier, and continued to read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I was fascinated by her conception of “the moment” and innovative use of stream of consciousness, key elements shaping her narrative point of view. In To the Lighthouse, she shows convincingly that the time perceived by her characters in the present moment is complex and multi-layered. I was struck by one single complex sentence consisting of 260 words that brilliantly captures the complexity of one moment through a skillfully layered structure of parenthetical phrases and clauses, modifying phrases, and a rich array of various subordinate clauses. 3

The mind of the central character, Mrs. Ramsay, constantly moves back and forth through memory and conjecture to connect the present moment to past experiences and future anxieties. One sound stops, so Mrs. Ramsay becomes aware of another, and ends with a momentary feeling of terror. Mrs. Ramsay has so gloomy a sense of life that she must constantly rely on the existence of family rituals all around her to assert her energies against the forces of death and decay.

I share this grim sense of life with Mrs. Ramsay. I have a strong feeling that life as I know it ends. Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. It is not a question of self-pity but a question of a, or I should say the, way of being, in an inevitable human existential condition. I try to say NO while time is passing; however, time is staying while I'm gradually passing by and away. Life changes while time is passing. I seem to have no control of the passage over time and over my life.

There is always a burning desire emerging from my heart and pushing me to stop and step into the river of my life. I want to re-live “moments of being”, as Virginia Woolf stressed in Moments of Being 2, of the year past: moments of being hurt badly and helped unexpectedly, of eyes wide open with surprise and brimming uncontrollably with tears, and of feeling hopeful and indifferent in silence. I am worried that most of my time is lived in what she called the "kind of nondescript cotton wool" of life "not lived consciously."

In and through my remembrance of things past, all of them are, eventually, merging into one remembered moment. A river of my life runs through it, a river that is always cutting and curving, now hurrying, now eddying, sometimes draining into dry channels, but still carrying its load of soil and rocks. Yet, there is a voice murmuring from beneath the river, "Don't worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." 4

Notes:

1 A River Runs Through It written by Norman Maclean.

2 Moments of Being is a collection of autobiographical fragments that Virginia Woolf wrote at various times in her life. These fragments fall rather neatly at the beginning, middle, and end of her career as a writer; thus, they provide an interesting perspective into her development as a writer.

3 “The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by the taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear what was said (as she sat in the window which opened on the terrace), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, "How's that? How's that?" of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, "I am guarding you--I am your support," but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.” (To the Lighthouse, 23-24)

4 Matthew, 6:34, the NIV Bible.
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Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

ericcoliu · 发表于: 星期六一月 19, 2008 4:36 pm 发表主题:

Moments of Being, the title of her autobiography, comes from one of autobiographical fragments, the piece entitled "A Sketch of the Past," where she talks about moments of being as the only moments that one really lives -- most days, she says, are made up of non-being, "a kind of non-descript cotton wool (...) a great part of every day is not lived consciously" (70). But what are these moments of being? They seem to be a kind of shock of transcendence, where the self is lost entirely and subsumed into something larger, where a pattern is revealed behind the cotton wool: "I am hardly aware of myself, but only of the sensation. I am only the container of the feeling of ecstasy, of the feeling of rapture" (67). Woolf's text is also interesting because of her ideas of what a self, and a life, really consists of.

For more details about Virginia Woolf's Temporal Perception in To the Lighthouse, you can take a look at my research essay entitled Disrupting Imperial Linear Time: Virginia Woolf's Temporal Perception in To the Lighthouse, which was published in Cultural Studies Monthly.

The link to my essay is as follows:
http://www.cc.ncu.edu.tw/~csa/journal/62/journal_park468.htm
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Time is nothing but a disquiet of the soul

fanfan · 发表于: 星期六一月 19, 2008 9:55 pm 发表主题:

ericcoliu · 发表于: 星期六一月 19, 2008 11:42 pm 发表主题:

Champagne · 发表于: 星期日一月 20, 2008 7:58 am 发表主题:

I love both of them, too.

Robert Redford manages the movie so well to catch the spirit of Maclean’s novella. In one affecting departure from the book, the movie shows Norman beginning and his father completing the final lines of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode:

Thanks to the human heart by

which we five,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys,

and fears,

To me the meanest flower that

blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep

for tears.

ericcoliu · 发表于: 星期日一月 20, 2008 12:14 pm 发表主题:

Maclean’s poetic and inward-turning narrative, which seeks to discover the elusive pattern that makes our lives into significant stories, finds the unexpectedly resonant link between the art of fly-fishing and the art of living.

fanfan · 发表于: 星期二一月 22, 2008 5:46 pm 发表主题:

星子 · 发表于: 星期二一月 22, 2008 8:02 pm 发表主题:

Thanks for sharing.

Very interesting and profound.
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ericcoliu · 发表于: 星期四一月 24, 2008 5:25 pm 发表主题:

Thank 星子 and fanfan for your read and comment.

fanfan · 发表于: 星期五一月 25, 2008 5:27 pm 发表主题:

In my view, life is made up of rare "moments of being" and countless interludes that are only shadows of them, hovering around us.
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Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

hahaview · 发表于: 星期四二月 07, 2008 10:54 am 发表主题:

Yes, life changes fast; life changes in an instant.

In and through reading your piece, I tried to catch your sense of "an impulse of terror," but I didn't get it fully. Maybe it's due to age difference or life experience.

In my view, life gives us brief moments of happiness( or moments of being); in those precious moments we get memories that last a life time.
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I came, I saw, and I conquered