Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo poems
- 2 Mixing memory and desire: rereading Eliot and the body of history
- 3 Eliot, eros, and desire: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’”
- 4 T. S. Eliot: writing time and blasting memory
- 5 Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the eros of memory: reading Orlando
- 6 Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse
- 7 Remembering what has “almost already been forgotten”: where memory touches history
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
6 - Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustration
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 An unexpected beginning: sex, race, and history in T. S. Eliot's Columbo and Bolo poems
- 2 Mixing memory and desire: rereading Eliot and the body of history
- 3 Eliot, eros, and desire: “Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’”
- 4 T. S. Eliot: writing time and blasting memory
- 5 Virginia Woolf, (auto)biography, and the eros of memory: reading Orlando
- 6 Other kinds of autobiographies: sketching the past, forgetting Freud, and reaching the lighthouse
- 7 Remembering what has “almost already been forgotten”: where memory touches history
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Index
Summary
I read some history: it is suddenly all alive, branching forwards & backwards & connected with every kind of thing that seemed entirely remote before. I seem to feel Napoleons influence on our quiet evening in the garden for instance – I think I see for a moment how our minds are all threaded together – how any live mind today is of the very same stuff of Plato's & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind. Then I read a poem say – & the same thing is repeated. I feel as though I had grasped the central meaning of the world, & all these poets & historians & philosophers were only following out paths branching from that centre in which I stand. And then – some speck of dust gets into my machine I suppose, & the whole thing goes wrong again.
Virginia Woolf, 1 July 1903She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller, with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole, bright, deep with understanding.
Virginia Woolf, Eleanor in The Years- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modernism, Memory, and DesireT. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, pp. 147 - 179Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008