THE MARK ON THE WALL by Virginia Woolf.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw.
So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book;
the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece.
Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea,
for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals,
and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind,
and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock.
Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy,
an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the
white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little
way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it....
If that mark was made by a nail, it can't have been for a picture, it
must have been for a miniature--the miniature of a lady with white
powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
A fraud of course, for the people who had this
house before us would have chosen pictures in that way--an old picture
for an old room.
That is the sort of people they were--very interesting
people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one
will never see them again, never know what happened next.
They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture,
so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art
should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder, as one is torn
from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit
the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban villa as one rushes
past in the train.
But as for that mark, I'm not sure about it; I don't believe it was made
by a nail after all; it's too big, too round, for that.
I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one
I shouldn't be able to say for certain; because once a thing's done,
no one ever knows how it happened.
Oh!
dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought!
The ignorance of humanity!
To show how very little control of our possessions we have--what an accidental affair
this living is after all our civilization--let me just count over a
few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always
the most mysterious of losses--what cat would gnaw, what rat would
nibble--three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools?
Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ--all gone, and jewels,
too.
Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips.
What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure!
The wonder is that I've any clothes on my back, that I sit
surrounded by solid furniture at this moment.
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it
to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour--landing at the
other end without a single hairpin in one's hair!
Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked!
Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office!
With one's hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse.
Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and
repair; all so casual, all so haphazard....
But after life.
The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the
cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges one with purple and red
light.
Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here,
helpless, speechless, unable to focus one's eyesight, groping at the
roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants?
As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether
there are such things, that one won't be in a condition to do for
fifty years or so.
There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected
by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped
blots of an indistinct colour--dim pinks and blues--which will, as
time goes on, become more definite, become--I don't know what....
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all.
It may even be caused by some round black substance, such
as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very
vigilant housekeeper--look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example,
the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments
of pots utterly refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane....
I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to
be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily
from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle.
I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard
separate facts.
To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea
that passes....
Shakespeare....
Well, he will do as well as another.
A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked
into the fire, so--A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high
Heaven down through his mind.
He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through
the open door,--for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer's
evening--But how dull this is, this historical fiction!
It doesn't interest me at all.
I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought,
a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the
pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest
mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear
their own praises.
They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that
is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:
"And then I came into the room.
They were discussing botany.
I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on
the site of an old house in Kingsway.
The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign of Charles
the First.
What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?"
I asked--(but I don't remember the answer).
Tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps.
And so it goes on.
All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly,
stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch
myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection.
Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself
from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous,
or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer.
Or is it not so very curious after all?
It is a matter of great importance.
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure
with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but
only that shell of a person which is seen by other people--what an airless,
shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes!
A world not to be lived in.
As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are
looking into the mirror; that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness,
in our eyes.
And the novelists in future will realize more
and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is
not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths
they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the
description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge
of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps--but
these generalizations are very worthless.
The military sound of the word is enough.
It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers--a whole
class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself,
the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart
save at the risk of nameless damnation.
Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday
afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons, and also ways of speaking of the
dead, clothes, and habits--like the habit of sitting all together in one
room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it.
There was a rule for everything.
The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was
that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments
marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in
the corridors of the royal palaces.
Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths.
How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to
discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks,
country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half
phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was
only a sense of illegitimate freedom.
What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things?
Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which
governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker's
Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half
a phantom to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed
into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and
the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth, leaving us
all with an intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom--if freedom exists....
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from
the wall.
Nor is it entirely circular.
I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that
if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point,
mount and descend a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those
barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps.
Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy like
most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to
think of the bones stretched beneath the turf....
There must be some book about it.
Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them
a name....
What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder?
Retired Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged labourers
to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into
correspondence with the neighbouring clergy, which, being opened at
breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison
of arrow-heads necessitates cross-country journeys to the county towns,
an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish
to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason
for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual
suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic
in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question.
It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites
a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of
the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious
thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead
there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the
foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many
Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery, and the wine-glass that
Nelson drank out of--proving I really don't know what.
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known.
And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain that the mark
on the wall is really--what shall we say?--the head of a gigantic old
nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient
attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head
above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life
in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I
gain?--Knowledge?
Matter for further speculation?
I can think sitting still as well as standing up.
And what is knowledge?
What are our learned men save the descendants of
witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods brewing herbs,
interrogating shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars?
And the less we honour them as our superstitions
dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases....
Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world.
A quiet, spacious world, with the flowers so red and
blue in the open fields.
A world without professors or specialists or
house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could
slice with one's thought as a fish slices the water with his fin,
grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of
white sea eggs....
How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of
the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden
gleams of light, and their reflections--if it were not for Whitaker's
Almanack--if it were not for the Table of Precedency!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really
is--a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation.
This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening
mere waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who
will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker's Table of Precedency?
The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor;
the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of
York.
Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker;
and the great thing is to know who follows whom.
Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging
you; and if you can't be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of
peace, think of the mark on the wall.
I understand Nature's game--her prompting to take action as a way of
ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain.
Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men
of action--men, we assume, who don't think.
Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's
disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have
grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which
at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the
shadows of shades.
Here is something definite, something real.
Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one
hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest
of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping
the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours.
That is what one wants to be sure of.... Wood is a pleasant thing to think
about.
It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don't know how
they grow.
For years and years they grow, without paying any attention
to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers--all things
one likes to think about.
The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint
rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its
feathers all green when it comes up again.
I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown
out; and of water-beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of
the river.
I like to think of the tree itself: first the close dry sensation
of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow,
delicious ooze of sap.
I like to think of it, too, on winter's nights standing
in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed
to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that
goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long.
The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June;
and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make
laborious progresses up the creases of the bark, or sun themselves upon
the thin green awning of the leaves, and look straight in front of them
with diamond-cut red eyes....
One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the
last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into
the ground again.
Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million
patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms,
in ships, on the pavement, lining rooms, where men and women sit after
tea, smoking cigarettes.
It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts,
this tree.
I should like to take each one separately--but something
is getting in the way....
Where was I?
What has it all been about?
A tree?
A river?
The Downs?
Whitaker's Almanack?
The fields of asphodel?
I can't remember a thing.
Everything's moving, falling, slipping, vanishing....
There is a vast upheaval of matter.
Someone is standing over me and saying--
"I'm going out to buy a newspaper."
"Yes?"
"Though it's no good buying newspapers....
Nothing ever happens.
Curse this war; God damn this war!...
All the same, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall."
Ah, the mark on the wall!
It was a snail.
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