Orlando after the change

p 161. "it was still a woman she loved; . . . For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark."  

She goes to her grand country home.  Cannot shake years of masterpiece theater imagery here.  British set pieces, core decor, colonial assumptions.  Book published in 1928!  Victorian, Edwardian, Raj, Empire ready to get blown up by the two wars.  

would have to ask my AI therapist why did I think I had not read this book?  I'm on page 211 now.  Should I go onward to the end, 329?  Omg it even has an index!  Ahh, so history of British Lit compressed thereinthere's the trick there's the rub.  

Ready to move over to Beckett, How It Is.  Whole chapter on that in Wimbush.  Start there. Planning to read first and last paragraph of each chapter in that book.  But who knows?  Think of it as a repeat and update, a repetition and archeology of The Waves.  Perhaps that book is the core of Woolf's whole work, each a variant of that---which was and led to the madness away from which she walked into the water loaded with stones.  212 has the beautiful passage about voice.  Would not have wanted to miss that.  

Turgenev or Beckett?  Have I ever tried Turgenev? Do not think so.  And yet, two pages into it, I wonder if I've not tried it before.  Two young men in the countryside, relaxing on the grass, talking philosophy of life and beauty.  On The Eve. Schopenhauer seems to bridge to Beckett.  Wimbush's book is exceptional.  Could read it as I read the trilogy and the Middling Women and As It Is.  Beckett as Buddhist quietist.  Quiet Buddhist.  Tranquil Handke-ist.