Thus far in my reading of To the Light house the most awe-inspiring thoughts pertain to the concepts of time and place. Virginia Wolf shows us just what it is like to exist in thought. Keeping all our little secrets locked away for only our own pleasure or pain. The place that is most important in this book (if not in life) would be in our own heads then. Imagine a world where anyone could read your thoughts. What identity would we have? Could we have any relationships at all? Would we think about God in the same way as we do now? for wouldn't we have the power of a God? Reading this book gives us this power through which no thought goes unseen. Even though we are given this capability I still can not apprehend the affect of such power. "Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all one's perceptions, half-way to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh?" (To the Light House, 50). These questions are at the very center of epiphanies, and at the same time kind of provide a guide of questions for us while we read. As participants in this story, Are we Gods? There is one more element that might make this question a little more one sided, and that is the element of "Time".
Time in this novel is very whimsical. Past, present, and a dreamy future are crumbled together throughout the pages. Tumbling everywhere, the reader is popping in and out of various notions of perceived time. Can this be seen as godly? Is this what it feels like to be a god? I don't really ever feel lost, but sometimes I must reflect back on what I read just to be sure that I'm in the relative character's mind-frame in that moment. Due to the unimportance of whether or not we are in the now, re-visiting the past, or creating a future, we (both the character and the reader) are stepping outside of time using our inner thoughts, while at the same moment we are still existing in "real" time. We are time-travelers. Isn't that godly? A shaman once told me that I could in fact be a divine being if I could only remember my way back to the "beginning". I think this is true, but I also now know that remembrance is only one step. I must now use my Art of Memory to proceed into my future divinity. Constructing and projecting my thoughts into others as I receive theirs, thus slowly I am becoming knowledgeable, wise, and half-way approaching a moment wrapped in golden mesh. My birth.
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