The Mark On the Wall by Virginia Woolf

"[...] one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where phantoms go."

"How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections (...)"

What a wonderful sense of freedom.

"All the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer."

"As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories,"

We are all living in our own made-up realities.

"I understand Nature's game--her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action--men, we assume, who don't think. Still, there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall."


"One by one the fibers snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes, and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground gain. Even so, life isn't done with; there are a million patient, watchful lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, living rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree."

I think Woolf is trying to portray the delicious feeling of just soaking up delightful, floating thoughts. This "tree" represents, like she herself said, "happy thoughts" which entertain the mind. "I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle, I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts." These thoughts grow in our idle thinking.

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Before someone put Virginia Woolf in a good light for me- I first heard of her and this story, The Mark on the Wall. Of course, I'm sure, like many others, they first hear that she was this crazy writer. And her writings such as this one would certainly seem to lean towards that. However, I don't think so. She reminds me of many of Dostoevsky's characters; when they ramble on and on incoherently. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that- for who doesn't do that? When one just sits there and thinks, it happens automatically. And actually, I don't think it's as incoherent as one may think. What did she try to say with the tree? Because somehow everything comes together in the end.

Virginia Woolf constructs the bridge between reality and our idle thoughts- and brings it to light. "How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, liftint it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it..." Our thoughts manipulate reality in some way, and so, reality ceases to be cold, hard facts, but a creation of our imagination. And she goes on to say that, in fact, her made up reality is more real than actual "facts"."Indeed, now that I have fixed my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real." Throughout the story she tries to balance her thoughts and this real, definite mark on the wall. In the end, Woolf brings us back to "reality" and ends by saying that this actual mark was not a mark the whole time, but a snail. All of these thoughts, concentrating on this one thing; were they all worthless? And I think she already answered it through the symbol of the tree, that these happy thoughts keep on growing without being affected by reality. Our mind will constantly produce them, and soon, they will spill over beyond the looking glass into our existence consisting of "hard separate facts."

And so, I want to end with this:

"How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom."

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Published by Halcyon Classics Series