et en arcadia ego...

...is the title of two famous pastoral paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). In Latin it roughly translates to, "Even in Arcadia I am," as though spoken by death personified. As the paintings demonstrate, it's typically a rather solemn, dark, even morbid declaration, a warning that death is ever present with us, even in our most idealized moments. At least, that's how I always trained to interpret it.

But that was before I read "Arcadia," by Tom Stoppard.

In the middle of one of busiest semester of my life, I read "Arcadia" in preparation for the MA exam; it's already made the exam worth it. It was that rare work where when I finished, I simply sat there and let my body soak up the aesthetic thrill that resulted; I didn't want to analyze it, re-read it, or move on to other homework, I simply wanted to sit there and feel it. This reaction was all the more unexpected because 1) the plot revolves around comic early-19th century regency intrigue, and modern-day Byron scholars pouring documents (hardly what you'd call captivating material), and 2) I'd already read Stoppard's earlier "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," which while also funny, is much more saturated in existential despair (as the indistinguishable leads realize they are minor characters in someone else's play).

But of course the plot is no more the play than the canvas or oils are the painting; it is only a single element of the entire artistic effect, and I wish I could preach that from the rooftops so all would hear. And as for the existential terror, Stoppard certainly hasn't avoided that here either; part of the denouement is when both 1809 Septimus and the modern-day scholars realize that young Thomasina has overthrown Newtonian physics through an iterated algorithm--all will eventually burn out, all heat will dissipate, we're all doomed. And what's more, even the Byron scholars frankly confess that everything they're doing is trivial. Even Byron wrote a poem predicting entropy before the scientists.

But then Hannah declares, "It's wanting to know that makes us matter." And the overthrow of Newtonian physics also clears the air of Newtonian determinism, freeing us up for all the possibilities of existence, and the documents uncovered by these scholars confirm what Septimus told Thomasina, that all that was lost will one day be recovered, or re-formed, re-born, that if everything winds down then perhaps it winds up again, who knows, they sure don't, but when Septimus says "So the Improved Newtonian Universe must cease and grow cold. Dear me," Thomasina responds, "Yes, we must hurry if we are going to dance," and the play ends with a waltz, and perhaps the most touching waltz I've ever read.

Et en Arcadia ego, death is ever-present, but in Stoppard's Arcadia, this isn't reason to cower or fear, but rather a cause of wonder, a liberation, a joy, and a reason to waltz. Death here isn't a creeping terror, but rather an old friend to cherish and trust.

I've grown to be more careful with the word "sublime" ever since I took a course on the Romantics, but "Arcadia" is a work where I feel comfortable using it.

Isaiah's Repetitive

Isaiah takes a lot of crap for being so incomprehensible--an erroneous reading, because I've just realized that Isaiah says the same thing over and over and over. The sinners will be punished, then everlastingly redeemed. What was lost will be restored. What was scattered will be gathered. The antagonists will be reconciled. What was lost will be found. The punishment will be brief, the restoration forever. Even just now, I've said basically the same thing five times in a row. Isaiah's doing the same thing--sixty-six chapters of saying the same thing over.

I guess maybe there's some confusion because Isaiah doesn't differentiate between redemption on a geo-political level and on an individual level, between the past, present, or future, between the symbol and the signified. Which of course he wouldn't, because why would he? They all apply.

There are no hidden mysteries in Isaiah; only poetry, poetry so gorgeous that it's not even lost in translation, which is the mark of a great poet. Not that he isn't also a Prophet; on the contrary, poetry, writing in general, is just another form of revelation.

Frederick Douglass and Health Care

Last semester I read for a class "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass," the autobiography of an escaped slave-turned-abolitionist. One of the key epiphanal moments in the book is when Douglass overhears his master lambasting those "wicked abolitionists" for inciting slaves to revolt. Douglass knew nothing about abolitionism at the time, but, his reading lessons recently squashed by the same master, and having lived with the lash since a child, he decided in that moment that whatever his master hated, he would love, and whatever his master loved, he would in turn hate.

It's a moral clarity I admire, one I don't get often in studying English. Don't get me wrong, I've never been a moral relativist; but English has taught me that every text, every interpretation, argument, problem and issue is so inherently complex and ambiguous that they defy any simple explanation. I've become immediately suspicious of any simplistic binary opposition. I'm typically left in the position of the Chinese farmer of parable who simply shrugged his shoulders at every event in his life saying, "I do not know if it is good or bad."

But then there's an upset in Massachusetts, and the Republicans cheer and rally with unprecedented Party unity around...denying healthcare to the poor? Really?

These following facts are weary but apparently need repeating: 46 million Americans have no healthcare; millions more are underinsured; 700,000 people annually go bankrupt due to medical costs; in 2008, in the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, 60% of all bankruptcies were still strictly healthcare related. These numbers will only increase as premiums continue to rise unchecked; small businesses will have to drop health-plans just to stay competitive. The whole of not only the Working but also Middle class is one major illness away from insolvency. To quote Joseph Smith, facts are stubborn things.

But they are also abstract, so I cite a few personal experiences: I once worked for a company that ran a charity drive for an employee whose brother needed a $200,000 life-saving procedure; the family had already maxed out its deductible and mortgaged the house. The company never matched employee donations, so the drive was largely tepid, and besides, the company just used it as a tax write-off anyways. In any case, I reflected that if one's last resort is to rely on corporate charity, one is screwed indeed.

My ex-roommate bikes, jogs, skis, and eats only organic, so it was a sick joke when he suffered a heart attack at the young age of 27. Lyme disease, undiagnosed by the University student health center (which was funded by a cost-and-corner-cutting private insurance), was the culprit. He required an ambulance (which was not pre-approved), and emergency pace-maker surgery. Predictably, the insurance company's first act was to try and find an excuse to deny him coverage; they claimed he had a pre-existing condition (as though that should matter). Finally they settled on reimbursing him only two-thirds the cost of the life-saving operation, leaving this poor college student six grand in debt. The Hospital was cool enough to help him juggle a couple costs, but really, they shouldn't have to.

I use him as an example to counter the arguments of 1) ER services are free so technically we already have universal healthcare (it's $50 just to enter the ER, and when you're impoverished, you don't have $50), and 2) that "socialized" healthcare unfairly subsidizes the willfully unhealthy with tax-payer money. Nevermind that no one dares call the Police, Fire Dept., and Military "socialist," even though they likewise are govt.-run, tax-payer funded services; because unlike the Police and Fire Dept., which thankfully not everyone needs, absolutely everyone will need healthcare at some point in their lives, no matter how healthy you keep yourself. The laws of entropy, old age, and chance work immutably on us all. Healthcare should be universal for the simple reason that disease and death are universal.

And then, most recently, my Dad confessed to me that if it had come down to it, he would have mortgaged the house just to keep Mom alive. Fortunately it never came to that; she followed the Republican health plan of dying quickly.

Which brings me back to the Republican Party's universal opposition to universal healthcare, and I have to wonder, why? Of course it comes down to money; it will cost lots of money to cover everyone, just as it cost money to pay Black people working wages instead of simply enslaving them. Suddenly the issue becomes far less ambiguous.

Republicans uniformly oppose healthcare reform; therefore, like Frederick Douglass, whatever healthcare position the Republicans hate, I must henceforth love, and whatever they love, I must henceforth hate. The names of Joe Wilson, Scott Brown, Sarah Palin and Glen Beck must be as George Wallace, James Calhoun, Strom Thurmond and Jefferson Davis; the Tea Party must be as the Klan; and failure to pass reform must be as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1851.

Certainly America as a whole is doing better than 150 years ago, when slavery in America was openly embraced and defended. But as we approach the 150th anniversary of the Civil War that ended slavery at last, we once again find a black man under fire for calling for radical reform of America. Like Douglass, he calls for the richest, most powerful democracy on Earth to at last live up to the self-evident truths that all men are created equal, (universal, we might say), that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of...well shoot, without healthcare, we're not even living up to that first one, are we.

It's moral clarity I can believe in.

The rustling blades and whispering wind

I sometimes feel like the barber-slave who knows Midas has donkey ears but has no one to tell, so digs a hole in the ground and tells his secret to the silent earth. Just so you follow the analogy: the internet is the dirt, this blog is a hole, and my posts are ass-ear whisperings. That seems about right.

But the thing is, the barber-slave had to speak, he couldn't contain himself--he had to say something somewhere, say something, anything, silence was death, voice was life (for breath is life, release, freedom, replenishment, rebirth), speech was how he became, the word was how he existed, so once he had something to say he said it, if only to the ground. Therein at least do I sympathize and identify.

Remastered Indeed

Few and far in between are the times when you can revisit something familiar as though it were new;
when you can experience something you love like the first time, and remember why you fell in love with it in the first place;
when you can open the door like Dorothy and move from black and white to technicolor;
when you can forget about all the pain in your life and the misery in the world and experience pure beauty, surging through your every cell in your body;
when you feel not just your mouth but your whole body smile, not out of gallows humor, but from sheer euphoria;
when you feel young again, not out of any middling nostalgic trip or distant memory, but out of an actual feeling of rebirth;
when you remember why you own a real, honest-to-goodness stereo that can thump the beat through your body, not just an "ihome" of some sort;
when you listen to music not for distraction, not for study, not to work out, and not to just get through another day, but for the simply pleasure of doing so.

The Remastered Beatles albums, my friends, is one of those times.

The Book of Mormon as a Post-Modern Text

Of course it's not a post-modern text; even the most virulent anti-mormon would call it a fabrication from the 1820s, not a post-WWII production. But its often fashionable to posit Renaissance, Medieval, and even Classical texts as possessing post-modern qualities, so I'd like to test out the same for the Book of Mormon:

-Post-Apocalyptic: Like Becket's "Endgame," Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle," and even McCormic's "The Road," The Book of Mormon is written after the final collapse of civilization. In Mormon's case, there is a double destruction addressed; he mourns his own nation's collapse circa AD 400, and writes for the benefit of a future world that likewise faces endtimes. Of course, in Mormon's paradigm, his own nation's collapse precedes a Restoration, just as the Last Days precede a Millenium, so in this sense he differs radically from Becket and Vonnegut, who's works possess no sense of redemption. But this cyclical view of history repeating ("The course of the Lord is one eternal round"), a la "Finnegan's Wake" and "Gravity's Rainbow," is also characteristic of many High Modernist and Post-Modern texts. And perhaps most significantly, Mormon's admonition to "cleave unto charity, which never faileth, for all things must fail" also acknowledges the primacy of entropy and the inevitable dissolution of all things. His preceding of this melancholy declaration with the more upbeat "cleave unto charity" is almost Vonnegutian.

-Polyphonic: Mormon's is the dominant voice, but throughout the text, other strong authorial voices are also featured, a la "Ulysses." Nephi, Jacob, Benjamin, Moroni, and even the Savior Himself take over the narrative at differing points, revealing a wide-range of voices and personalities interacting with each other, speaking in the first, second, and third persons.

-Collage: Closely related to polyphony is collage. The Book of Mormon begins with a first-person abridgment from an earlier historical source, and through the Book will contain excerpts from sermons, prayers, coronation ceremonies (Mosiah 2-5), poems (2 Nephi 5, Alma 29), and epistles, as well as Hebrew scripture.

-Extratextuality: In a classic post-modern move, Isaiah, Malachi, and The Sermon on the Mount are all whole-sale quoted, but radically recontextualized in the process: the reader is explicitly instructed to "liken Isaiah unto yourself," while Malachi and the Sermon are delivered by a resurrected Jesus Christ in the ancient Americas, with significant commentary appended by Jesus himself. The fact that Malachi (a post-diaspora Prophet unknown to that civilization) is quoted by Jesus as written by Malachi, even though he's the one who delivered the revelation to Malachi in the first place, raises significant questions about the nature of authorship. Which brings us to...

-Collapsing Categories: Besides questioning the category of authorship, the Book of Mormon also features significant quotations from Dead Sea Scroll (unknown till 1947; hey look, the post-modern era!) writers. Now, the Book of Mormon's very existence challenges the category of a "closed canon," but doubled with the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the latter's presence in the former, further explodes the very concept of "canon" altogether.

-Self-aware/meta: The Book of Mormon always knows that it is a book, and never lets the reader forget it. It even comments on the metal plates upon which it is written, calling attention to the medium itself. The writers are always commenting the writing process itself (eg Ether 12:23-27), and from the first author (1 Nephi 6) on, declares its awareness that they are part of a larger narrative, meant to interact with the world outside the text.

Now, wasn't that fun? Of course, the fact that these post-modern characteristics can be so easily applied to scripture may just mean that these characteristics are too nebulous to define any specific literary period or genre, undercutting the very category of post-modernism itself (which is also a very post-modern move). Or maybe I'm just bending textual evidence to fit my ridiculous thesis. Whatever. It's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. I read the Book of Mormon, prayed about it, and felt that it was true--a purely epistemological concern; for if all experience is mediated through sensation, and since experience is incommunicable, any religious experience I feel, or sensate, is private, personal, and incommunicable; questioning the veracity of the experience is like Descarte questioning if our senses lie or if we even exist; trusting our sensations is the nature of faith (in which sense we all live by faith)--and that's why I'm LDS. As Nibley said, all the rest of this is just junk and stuff.

Karaoke and Karate

Once I was driving with my brother, who as Asbergers. He was prattling about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, his love of Bryan Adams, and so forth, when out of no where he states, "Since 'karaoke' means 'empty symphony' in Japanese, and 'karate' means 'empty hand,' 'kara' must mean 'empty' in Japanese, 'oke' must mean symphony, and 'te' must mean hand." I said "oh," and then, "huh? what?" He doesn't do it often, but sometimes he just blows my mind.

The Politics of the Book of Mormon

Moroni 7:45-48 is frequently quoted in LDS circles; as a pick-me-up; as sentimentalism; as a sermon; as a call to love; as doctrine on the nature of God. Lately, I've also been treating it as a political statement.

Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in the Book of Mormon? Initially, the Nephites and Lamanites split into a pretty even binary, with the latter intent on the destruction of the former. Yet before this family feud is a generation old, the prophet Jacob is calling the Nephites to repentance, declaring they are even worst than their enemies in their pride and adultery.

Capt. Moroni seems to present a clear contrast to the wicked Amalikiah--except that Amilikiah was also a Nephite; in fact, the Lamanite ranks were loaded with Nephite dissenters. And by the then certain of the Lamanites had converted to the Nephites, and in fact were more extreme in their pacificism. And when the Lamanites did choose to fight, they were blessed with a divine protection that the Nephite armies never merited. The binary has become very muddled.

By Helaman 6, the Lamanites and Nephites have completely switched--and within a few years of that, the two sides have collapsed into multiple sects, all wicked, except for a few here and there, of all sects.

As of 4 Nephi, there are no sides at all, but by Mormon's time, there is a binary again, both wicked.

So who's the good guys in the Book of Mormon? Mormon was a military general and therefore intimately involved in the politics of his people; when he wrote that "charity never faileth, for all things must fail," he would know, for he beheld the final collapse of his civilization. For Mormon, the good guys are whoever has charity, regardless of political affiliation, and he demonstrates this principle repeatedly throughout the Book of Mormon.

I was generally raised conservative; in college I became more liberal. Yet I've often felt the same reactionism against conservatives now days that I felt against liberals as a youth, which has made me wonder if my shift in political allegiances has failed to address the core problem.

Who are the good guys and bad guys today? Should I vote Republican or Conservative? Libertarian or Green? Capitalist or Communist? According to the Book of Mormon, these are all mis-leading categories--the good guys are whoever has charity. They exist among all parties, nations, religions, tongues and creeds. They are few and far between. The Book of Mormon is a warning against false binaries--it is a call not to categories but to compassion.

Throwing Couches Off of Balconies

Today I threw a couch off a balcony. There was a completely legitimate reason to do so, but somehow the reason seemed besides the point. I even have a video of it, but I haven't yet figured out how to upload it.

I like to think that throwing a couch off a balcony is its own reason for doing so. Aristotle called these "goods of first intent." "Goods of second intent," by contrast, are things that are only good for accomplishing other things; no one buys a hammer just to have a hammer, but to hammer a nail in a wall; and you don't even want the nail, but to hang a picture of your fam; and you don't even want that, you want to be happy, and happiness is a good of first intent. "Goods of second intent" are the means, while "goods of first intent" are the ends.

But why can't the sheer thrill of hammering stuff be a good of first intent as well? I read that lots of construction workers are having trouble finding work nowadays in part because they refuse to re-train for a new field; they just love hammering stuff, its a good of first intent for them, and that they build houses doing so is a good of second intent, the means of how they can get paid to keep doing goods of first intent. I once worked construction, I wasn't that good at it, but I do understand that thrill of hammering, the joy of making something with your own bare-hands.

I also understand because I'm an English grad student, and I'm constantly having to justify why I do what I do. I'm currently a Writing Fellow for the Office of Vice-President of Research, helping professors and grad students in the sciences copy-edit grant proposals and proof-read dissertations. It's a job I'm glad I have. But part of why I'm glad to have it is because its something to point at when I'm inevitably questioned as to the utility of my degree.

Now, English is certainly useful; clear writing and communication will always be important skills in any profession. But that's not why I study English; I do it cause I enjoy it, for me it's a good of first intent, and like construction workers, I'm constantly having to figure how to get people to keep paying me to do so. And I'm not so naive as to preach how we all need to just do what we love and let life work out; I have bills to pay, I've been broke before, and I have to live with the fact that my means is someone elses end and vice-versa, and I need to justify my ends to their means.

But then I throw a couch off a balcony, and I have a completely legitimate reason to do so, but its also beside the point; the reason is the means, the action is the end. I should throw couches off balconies more often. It makes me happy.

Burning Down the House

I read Nibley's "Temple and Cosmos" over the break; one of the essays in it posits that the one function religion must serve is to answer "the terrible questions," namely, why are we here and what happens when we die. If religion doesn't answer those questions, it fails in its function. Harold Bloom said something similar, to the effect of, "What is the essence of religion? Freud called it the desire for the father, others for the mother, others for transcendence...I fear these are all mere idealizations, and would all fade away if we did not know we must die." This incidentally is the theme of DeLillo's "White Noise," wherein the protagonist refutes the claim that life's brevity makes us better appreciate it better; for him, one can't enjoy anything, because the moment we begin to, we remember we'll one day die and thus never be able to enjoy it again. Death ruins everything, he says, it's the white noise (eh? eh?) permeating our existence. My, that got morbid fast, now didn't it! I didn't mean it to, though I do that a lot. Once in class we were discussing Melville's "Bartelby the Scrivener," and I offered that Bartelby ceases to function because he realizes we're all just dead letters on our way to the furnace. Every one slouched in their chairs, stared at the table despairingly, and I was left in the role of the comic figure, shrugging my shoulders goin' "what? what'd I say?" I was probably surprised at their response, since one can't study literature without tripping over the terrible questions constantly. I mean, c'mon, Hamlet? In Memoriam? Paradise Lost? The Waste Land? What else are these works about? But then, I'm religious; I fear not oblivion but rather a just God. I can afford to talk morbidly without becoming morbid, I guess. I suspect those who become morbid are hiding from the terrible questions more than anyone. On a brighter note, I think someone should write a rom-com entitled "Burning Down the House," featuring the Talking Heads song prominently. It should feature giant explosions, maybe the protagonist's apt. blowing up so he has to move in with his ex, and mayhem and rediscovered love ensue while the arsonist (perhaps played by Jack Black) continues on the loose. Maybe the secret arsonist is the protagonist's best friend. C'mon, screenwriter hacks, this crap writes itself! I want a rom-com with giant explosions--do I need to write this myself?

Ecclesiastes is so Emo

I never got into emo (I admittedly laughed out loud the first time I saw the "I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself" shirt), so I'm probably unqualified to state that the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes is totally emo. Nevertheless, let's take a quick sampling of its content, and tell me these couldn't be Taking Back Sunday lyrics:

"All is vanity"

"there is no thing new under the sun"

"I gave my heart to know wisdom and to know madness"

"Sorrow is better than laughter"

"oppression makes a man wise"

"an untimely birth is better than he"

"who knows what is good for man in life, all the days of vain life which he spends as a shadow?"

"a living dog is better than a dead lion"

I rest my well-argued, rigorously researched case.

2010

On Jan. 1st, the fam watched "2010," the 1984 sequel to "2001: A Space Odyssey." Like the first, it was based on the Arthur C. Clarke novel, but was not directed by Stanley Kubrick. As such, "2010's" total mis-predictions of what 2010 might look like are a little less forgivable (where are my commercial space ships, huh? my talking computers? where are my hoverboards? I'm looking at you, Back to the Future! you have five years to deliver, you hear? five years), but it's still an enjoyable flick. If you want to see Jupiter turn into a sun, put it on your netflix cue, post-haste.

And don't feed me no crap about how we're so much more wired and advanced then the futurists and scientists could have predicted, either; if it's a choice between the 2010 with iphones, youtube, and twitter, and the 2010 with the moonbases, I'll gladly snatch up the latter. You can update your facebook status to "just saw Avatar in 3-D: awesome!!!," while I'll be checking into the frickin' Sheraton on the Sea of Tranquility.

Seriously, if someone from 1968 came out of cryogenic freezing today and asked to see the latest technological advancements, he'd probably smile politely at e-mail and our ability to watch DVDs in bed, but all while I guarantee he'd be scratching his head thinking, "Golly, I thought for sure there'd be moonbases by now..." (Also, I think we should all start saying "Golly" unironically again).

But then, in "2010," Clarke presupposes that the cold war is still in full swing; the action pivots on a combined Soviet-U.S. space mission to Jupiter. So, if the price we have to pay to live in a universe where the people of the former Soviet bloc are free is to live in a world with facebook, the Star Wars prequels, and Wolf Blitzer CGI-ing some hackneyed hologram on election night, then it's a price I'm willing to pay.

For freedom.

Age-Appropriate Reading

I tried to read the Harry Potter series over the Christmas break--I got half-way through the third one when I found I was skimming through the prose; I decided this wasn't required reading and moved on to other books. Not that the prose was awful (at least, not Stephanie Meyer awful), on the contrary, the prose was very age appropriate. Because that's the thing--Harry Potter is written for children, and the time for me to have gotten into Harry Potter was when I was, say, 10, and not in my mid-20s.

Sadly, Harry Potter did not exist when I was 10, so I missed the zietgeist on that one; a shame, because I can totally see my 10-year-old self getting totally into it. But, it did get me thinking about age-appropriate reading.

Some reading I hit at just the right moment. For example, I first read Catch-22 when I was 17; I remember that book absolutely blew my mind, and that an age when one could use the phrase "blew my mind" un-ironically. I laughed, I cried, and when I finished I was so enthralled by the ending that I went outside and threw the book into the air in sheer ecstasy.

I re-read Catch-22 about a year ago. I still laughed, I still cried, I still enjoyed it, and I still recommend it when people ask for reading suggestions. But...the magic of reading it, it just wasn't the same as when I was 17. I found myself very grateful that I'd read it in High School, and not in grad school.

Some books, even literary ones, I fear I've gotten to too late. For example, I didn't get to reading Wuthering Heights till a couple years ago; an engaging work worthy of being deemed a literary classic, for sure. But, all while reading it, I couldn't shake the feeling that if I'd read that one when I was 17 as well, I would've been absolutely enthralled by that one as well; it would have been so haunting, so dark, so wrong yet so right! But as it now stands, I'm too familiar with the convention of the Byronic hero to find Heathcliffe all that interesting.

Of course, some writing I encountered too early; for example, when I read Tale of Two Cities, in 10th grade English, well, I really might as well have not read it, because I only remember being bored to tears. Note to High School English teachers: a single beheading on the last page does not qualify a work as "gory and violent" enough to engage teenagers. In any case, I really do need to re-read that one because my relationship with Dickens has since vastly improved.

About the same time I read Wuthering Heights, I also read Dicken's Great Expectations, and that one really was haunting. My ex was getting married, I was using my college degree to work as a substitute teacher, and after traveling the world I was once again living at home. Yeah, I was feeling pretty lame; my own personal great expectations had momentarily collapsed. Pip just felt too familiar at that moment. In fact, it was almost too serendipitous to read Great Expectations at that moment in my life. That novel still haunts me. Yet even as I read it I was aware that if I'd read it in 10th grade, it also would have bored me to tears.

Meanwhile, there are some books I've read that I feel I'm still not old enough to fully appreciate. For example, I recently finished a Virginia Woolf binge (I needed to familiarize myself with her work for a paper I'm writing). I very much admire her prose and ideas. Yet I found myself enjoying her non-fiction more than her fiction. At first I thought it was because she was writing in a feminine-exclusive discourse, in opposition to the dominant patriarchy, so, although men were certainly allowed to read, they sadly couldn't participate.

But then, plenty of men have loved Woolf's novels over the years, and Woolf herself writes credible male characters. So what I next noted about her novels is that nearly all her major characters are middle-aged; the passage of time is as much a theme of her novels as feminist concerns. Her characters are all old enough to have to live with the inevitable regret of squandered youth, lost opportunities, and a past that both haunts and evades them. In a sense, I hope I'm never old enough to fully appreciate Virginia Woolf novels.