Sina Queyras

I wrote about writing Rooms over at Kathryn Mockler’s Send My Love To Anyone.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Woolf of 1919 is on fire; emerging. The Woolf of 1929 is towering. The vistas were hers to describe, the descent not at all on her mind. The Woolf of 1939 is fatigued. Frayed. The house Woolf lived in for two decades on Tavistock Square was bombed. They moved to a new house on Mecklenberg Square. In October 1940 the Woolfs arrived in London to find those rooms blasted open as well: ‘I cd just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books,’ Woolf writes, ‘A wind blowing through. I began to hunt out my diaries.’ Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting covers this moment well. And it drifts through my Rooms. It drifts through my relationship with Woolf. A perennial, but brutal optimism. Finding beauty in ruins.

As Woolf finishes her 1940 entry, she observes a strange relief at the prospect of losing it all. Of starting fresh in peace. It’s not a feeling she sustains; the certainty that Hitler would win the war was high then, and the idea that life as her circle knew it would be lost forever was very real.

As Woolf finishes her 1940 entry, she observes a strange relief at the prospect of losing it all. Of starting fresh in peace. It’s not a feeling she sustains; the certainty that Hitler would win the war was high then, and the idea that life as her circle knew it would be lost forever was very real.

Thanks Kathryn, for ongoingness. Read the full post here!