Book Notes, Summary and Review: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

To The Lighthouse, written by Virginia Woolf, is a classic for a reason.

Much of the exciting drama in the book occurs not because of what the characters say or do, but because of what they think about. Woolf employs the use of various literary techniques, such as stream of consciousness and differing points of views, to bring us the readers deep inside the minds of the characters. From our insights on the characters' inner thoughts, we learn of the underlying tensions and allegiances which characterize their complex relationships.

Woolf also employs powerful imagery and metaphors that inject an aesthetically-pleasing, poetic quality to the book. Some of my personal favorite descriptions in the story are as follow:

Immediately, Mrs. Ramsay seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion [...]

She bore about with her, she could not help knowing it, the torch of her beauty; she carried it erect into any room that she entered [...]

What ultimately cements this book, in my opinion, as one of the great timeless literary classics of all time is: the themes presented in this book. As a reader, we're invited to wrestle with some of life's largest, most complex questions. What is the significance of our lives in the grand scheme of everything? How does true love look like? Is immortality just a beautiful illusion?

Some of these questions are left unanswered, and understandably so. Woolf's role here is to plant the questions into the readers' mind, leaving them to search for and to craft their own answers.

For some questions, however, Woolf does offer her interpretations. For instance, Woolf's understanding of immortality:

And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespear3e. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still.

Or Woolf's take on what love is:

It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered; love that never attempted to clutch its object; but, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols, or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain.

And, Woolf's answer to the meaning of life:

[...] what is the meaning of life? That was all - a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark [...]

The combination of Woolf's insightful interpretations of the human condition, coupled with her unique writing style, is what makes To The Lighthouse a story worth reading again and again.