Prospect of dream, mirror of water
sheltered in rock, thin shadows
dropped into sleep to hold the fragments
I remember.
– Patrick Lane
In A Sketch of the Past Virginia Woolf wonders how one can fathom events from the past, observing that ‘the past is much affected by the present moment’. Talking about the past turns past events into history, giving them the form and coherence the present lacks. And that present needs a little support, for ‘the present when backed by the past’ is so much deeper than ‘the present that presses so close that you can feel nothing else’. She completes her argument by saying that the present, intensely importune as it is, can only be understood by looking back on events that have taken place already, through history’s ‘distorted’ tale of what is no more.
In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else.
– Virginia Woolf
Woolf wants to recapture her sense of the present by ‘getting the past to shadow this broken surface. Let me then,’ she writes, ‘like a child advancing with bare feet into a cold river, descend again into that stream.’
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Patrick Lane is a Canadian poet. The poem is from his collection Syllable of Stone. 2006. More about Lane here.
Virginia Woolf’s ideas are discussed at length in To the river (2011) by British author Olivia Laing.
Still: Whiteadder Stone, 2014. Foto © Gertrudsdottir.
The stone was found during a cold walk on Priesthill Moor in the Lammermuirs.
Read this post in Dutch here.
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