SOLID OBJECTS: Virginia Woolf

“; nothing was so solid, so living, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as these two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill.”

We home in, with a focussing camera, towards two black dots, on a beach, not such a soft focus as the Zweig camera immediately above, but we realise they are solid objects, two young men, in political discussion, one of them a Parliamentarian, we later learn. And, when they sit near a rock pool, this one had idly burrowed with his hand, and found the green glassy object the description of which will haunt you as all great stories do. And later he becomes tormented with collecting similar solid objects, looking in waste grounds etc, to the detriment of his constituents. Till he is not elected as MP again. Friends desert him, too. And this seems a timely factoring into our own political times when hard obsessions become lies….

“It might so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I, I!”

“…like a creature from another world – freakish and fantastic as a harlequin. It seemed to be pirouetting through space, winking light like a fitful star.”

“It was almost identical with the glass in shape, massy and globular, but so cold and heavy, so black and metallic, that it was evidently alien to the earth and had its origin in one of the dead stars or was itself the cinder of a moon.”

“…disappointments were innumerable, but always some gleam of hope, some piece of china or glass curiously marked or broken lured him on.”

Tormented indeed with objective-correlatives as engendered by crystallised ideas grown more solid than the self, and even the words he harnesses or is harnessed by become nuggets from a future cyberspace?

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Full context of above review: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/1351-2/