From Graffiti to Woolf
Saturday 07/21/2007 7:57 PM (In the United Kingdom: Sunday 07/22/2007 12:57 AM)
A piece of temporary graffiti that caught my eye on the way to the library today -- not sure if we're supposed to read it as an invitation to hate, or as a rethinking of one's inclination to hate:
Spent the whole, long day in the library, but I've made some good progress. I realized tonight that I haven't really explained on this blog what I've been doing there, but I'm not getting into that now ... I'll save it for a later post. Though I love the work, at this hour, my attitude toward my relationship to it might best be symbolized through my photo of this lovely bench in the lobby of the British Library:
Once they kicked me out of the Manuscripts Room this evening (no, I didn't set fire to anything; they were closing), I finally found the ole fish & chips I was searching for last night. The mashed peas served with it are actually very tasty ... and much more vibrant in real life than they appear here:
I've been taking a different route back to the B&B each night (purposefully), and tonight, I found myself walking along the edge of Tavistock Square. I saw a large statue in the center that looked it might be Gandhi. Then I remembered that Dr. D, Otterbein's Woolf scholar, told me that she'd found a bust of Virginia Woolf along with a statue of Gandhi in a small park in this neighborhood, so I wandered in for a closer look. I made it to Gandhi first, and it really is a wonderful piece:
Off in the far left corner of the square, I spotted what I could tell, even from that distance, was the bust Dr. D had told me about:
For those of you who don't know, Virginia Woolf's essays have had everything to do with why I've turned out to be an essayist, for more reasons than I can get into tonight. The important thing, I suppose, is to know that the 40 minutes or so I spent with her were the most moving moments of my trip so far. The bust is here because she lived in a house that once stood on the edge of the Square. According to the plaque below the dates of her life and death, she wrote that she was walking around Tavistock Square when the idea for To the Lighthouse (generally considered one of her most important novels) came to her.
I tried several times to take a picture of the two of us (the one above is the best I could come up with), and then I sat with her for a while, even though it had just rained and all the benches were wet.
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