To the Lighthouse

Michael Wright reconsiders Virginia Woolf's masterpiece

I first met Michael Wright nine-plus years ago. We took Frances, who was then four months old, to Los Angeles to stay with Michael and his wife, Lindsey, our good friend since college. We didn’t waste much time and became fast friends, striking up email and text exchanges almost immediately. When they moved to the Twin Cities during the pandemic, it felt like a homecoming. For an outsider looking in, it might read like a Portlandia sketch when we get together—”Have you read this? Yep. What about this? And how about this? Sure, sure, but have you considered this?”— and the talk is usually centered around books, art, how to think well and clearly, and, in general, how to live a good life. We have a book club of two, and Michael always impresses me with his ability to synthesize and articulate complex ideas. Michael is a deep listener, and he makes space for people and their musings, which results in the feeling of having received a gift. You always walk away feeling better, lighter—as is evident in his writing for Still Life, a wonderful archive of writing on art and spirituality, linked below, and in his essays on art for magazines like Image Journal and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles. Without further ado, here’s my good friend, Michael Wright, on Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece.

-Josh

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A few days ago, my dad sent me a short clip from an old home movie. I watch the fifteen seconds over and over on a loop on my laptop, the clinks and chatter of the coffeeshop fading into the background.

We’re at the Tennessee lake house for our annual family reunion. I’m on a three-wheeler, looking up at my grandfather—my mom’s father, Charles, Minerva Church of Christ elder, with a handshake that can stake you into the ground—while he gives me some last minute advice. I nod my head, fringed in a bowler’s cut. And off I go.

I’m on a three-wheeler talking to my grandfather and my mom walks through the frame. Her hair’s pulled up, and she’s in a swimsuit swatting away some flies. I must be older than her now. Uncle Ed is in the foreground, leaning back into a deep breath by a life vest draped over a lawn chair. He glances up at the three of us and back to his thoughts. We buried him in the family plot last year.

Off I go, and the camera follows: Aunt Susan lounging with an open book on her chest, Uncle David and Aunt Michelle at the swing. With a slight push from David, my cousin Chloe jumps off the swing and toward Susan’s open arms as I ride past the gazebo and toward the lake house.

Reading Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse feels a bit like this loop: a family vacation, time split and stretched. Most of the plot centers on a single day: the Ramsay family stays at their beach house at the Hebrides, debating all day whether or not they’ll visit a local lighthouse. There’s house plants, open air painting, darning stockings, searching for a lost brooch on the beach, leaning into a candlelight dinner. All told, if you cut out everything but the plot, the book would be not much longer than a zine. Woolf is interested in plot, yes, but she splits and stretches these moments, draping the inner lives of her characters between them. 

Mr. Ramsay stares and stares at a geranium, drenching the leaves with his insecurities about lack of success as a professor. A stocking unravels Mrs. Ramsay’s thoughts about the tenuous status of their marriage. An artist feels the lingering stare of a man over her unfinished landscape painting, and we feel the weight of women artists struggling to work under Victorian gender politics. Hefty stuff, but Woolf’s prose flows around and into each moment, pulling the reader down its existential currents (Buy two copies and give one to your therapist—they’ll love it).

Lily Briscoe—the artist painting by the sea—is a clear avatar for Woolf herself, especially in the context of the structure of the novel. Three acts: the single day, a long night, a day to travel to the lighthouse. Only, Woolf stretches that long night into years. Family and friends grow apart, Mrs. Ramsay dies, World War I comes and goes, and Woolf focuses her attention on the decaying house: “chaos streaked with lightning” tumbles into wind and waves, tumble together over the decade” as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.” The people gone, Woolf’s search for meaning spirals through empty rooms toward the abyss.

And the “next” day, a decade later? It’s Mr. Ramsay, bringing back a few of the children to travel to the lighthouse and absolve himself of unresolved guilt. Lily Briscoe is there too, brushing off her painting and wondering aloud whether or not art can rescue anything from the crushing flow of time. Spoiler: the group reaches the lighthouse, and it’s as blunt and unfulfilling as you’d expect. But the real climax is Lilly—Woolf—putting the final marks on the canvas to reconcile these fragments into a single vision.

Discovering To The Lighthouse in college felt like a revelation. Her prose, washing over me. As an intense college student, I read the book like scripture, pouring over every page and writing about the novel for my senior thesis. It was a paper on literature and “epistemology”—a term my Christian college literature professors let me use even though I didn’t understand it. I was a frustrated agonistic, not yet diagnosed as bipolar, looking for new answers. I was searching. I found in Woolf’s novel a seriousness about the depths of life that matched how I viewed my own. 

But what was I looking for? Capital-T Truth? Did I find it? A decade later, I wonder if Woolf and I were looking in the wrong place. Or at least, re-reading it now, I wonder if the existential lyricism of To The Lighthouse was more a symptom of my inability to get out of my own head, my undiagnosed depression. Author and reader, lost in thought.

Re-reading the novel, I love that prose but feel drawn to the people themselves. The Ramsays and their friends are deeply, deeply insecure. Unable to say what they really want and so wracked with insecurity, the slightest comment sends them into spirals of fantastical thinking. The Ramsay son James fantasizes about stabbing his father. Mr. Ramsay, stands on “on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away…like a desolate sea-bird, alone.” Lily removes herself from others, struggling alone under aesthetic dilemmas. Seated around the dinner table, “they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there.” Standing alone by the sea, clinging to a table like driftwood, these people are desperate to escape the flow of time.

None of this is really an evaluation of Woolf’s writing—the sentences are stunners. I guess what I’m trying to understand is the undercurrent, a subtle refusal of life even as she describes it so powerfully. “In the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances,” she writes. And filling that distance? An "unreal but penetrating and exciting universe… made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.” She thought of her novel as an elegy, and by the end, as Lily’s struggle to make sense of a receding past, it all seems to slip through our fingers like sand. Elegy after a well-lived life can be joyous, but elegy—chronic, unwavering—in the midst of living? That’s something else entirely, something darker (Woolf herself ended her own life by walking into a river, pulled under its flow).

Everyone’s a lighthouse in this novel—standing defiant and alone against an unreal world. What resolves this existential conflict, for Woolf, is art and literature itself. This is why she gives the whole third act to Lily Briscoe, returning to the beach house, combing through her memories, and reconciling the past through her artwork. But penetrating into the heart of things needs more than eyes and ink on the page—it needs grounding in real relationships. In good food, laughter, a trust in one another that we say what we mean. A conviction that we’re in this flood of time, together.

Michael Wright is a writer and educator living in Minneapolis. He writes Still Life, a weekly letter on art and spirit. Currently on hiatus, you can explore the archive for more.

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Have you read To the Lighthouse? It seems to be one of those love/hate books. We’d love to hear your thoughts below. What else have you been reading lately?

As always, support local, indie bookstores if you can, or buy from Bookshop. I went down a little rabbit hole after reading Michael’s piece, and found this cool first edition cover.