The Waves

The last book I've read in Atlanta...and will be the last book I read in a while.

I picked this up since it was quoted a lot in All the Bright Places, and true to its reviews everywhere, it's a hard read because the style was so experimental. It felt like reading As I Lay Dying. Luckily I came across a passage that I liked early in the book, or else I probably would've dropped it.

When I heard you cry I followed you, and saw you put down your handkerchief, screwed up, with its rage, with its hate, knotted in it. But soon that will cease. Our bodies are close now. You hear me breathe. You see the beetle too carrying off a leaf on its back. It runs this way, then that way, so that even your desire while you watch the beetle, to possess one single thing (it is Louis now) must waver, like the light in and out of the beech leaves; and then words, moving darkly, in the depths of your mind will break up this knot of hardness, screwed in your pocket handkerchief.
...
"But when we sit together, close," said Bernard, "we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with most. We make an unsubstantial territory."

The last line is a good summary of Bernard's character, which is the most fully developed of the 6.

Overall, I understood little of the book, but did enjoy what I did understand. I got that this work explores identity, by asking both questions of "who am I" (internal) and "how do others affect my identity" (external). And I think the spectrum of answers to these questions, as represented by the characters, are all valid, although by Bernard having the last word, Woolf seem to say that the boundaries that we impose to separate our identify from everyone else's...is artificial and brings a good amount of suffering.

Here's other quotations that I liked / understood:

"Bernard has gone," said Neville, "without a ticket. He has escaped us, making a phrase, waving his hand. He talked as easily [...] to the plumber as to us. [...] But what did Bernard feel for the plumber? Did he not only wish to continue the sequence of the story which he never stops telling himself? He began it when he rolled his bread into pellets as a child. One pellet was a man, one was a woman. We are all pellets. We are all phrases in Bernard's story, things he writes down in his notebook under A or under B. He tells our story with extraordinary understanding, except of what we most feel. For he does not need us. He is never at our mercy.

I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am. 

"Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one's friend perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to face one's self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. 

We have come together [...] to make one thing, not enduring - for what endures? - but been by many eyes simultaneously. There is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven-sided flower, many petalled, red, puce, purple-shaded, stuff with silver-tinted leaves - a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contributions. 

I cannot make one moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate [...]. I have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and hour to hour, solving then by some natural force until they make the whole and indivisible mass that you call life. 

"It is Percival," said Louis, [...] who makes us aware that these attempts to sag, 'I am this, I am that,' which we make, coming together, like separate parts of one body and soul, are false. Something has been left out from fear. Something has been altered, from vanity. We have tried to accentuate differences. From the desire to be separate we have laid stress upon our faults, and what us particular to us.

"Yet these roaring waters," said Neville, "upon which we build our crazy platforms are more stable than the wild, the weak and inconsequent cries that we utter when, trying to speak, we rise; when we reason and jerk out these false sayings, "I am this; I am that!' Speech is false.
We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are it slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumine and everlasting road.

The last quotation is from the chapter were all six characters dine with Pervical, and the mood reminds me a lot of H&C. Cue warm fuzzies.