First, a passage to set the tone (one that should be familiar):
With the sound of the sea in their ears, vines, meadows, rivulets about them, they [i.e., the ancient Greeks] are even more aware than we are of a ruthless fate. There is a sadness at the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure, and it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age. (E4: 50–51)
Second, a summary of my position and purpose: The novels of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore glimpse and occasionally enact a disquieting—what I have come to call a cosmic—indifference to human lives, cultures, languages, pleasures, pains, values, and concerns. This indifference, this non-attitude of nothingness, is not mitigated, neither overcome nor counter-acted. It, and the “ruthless fate” it implies, lingers in the background of their writings: an elegant, sublime, threatening, and seductive point of view that is unmoved by violence, death, and cruelty. Far from brightening this disconcerting background, my conclusion suggests that our novelists learn something by imagining their way into this void, using it as a critical optic for glancing at what they, what we, what “one cannot not want” (Spivak 47). It keeps coming back to me, this clause: “There is a sadness at the back of life.…” It points, quite directly I think, at the nothing against which we fortunate creatures have collectively erected all kinds of vague, alluring, evolving, and self-important consolations. This sadness is sad insofar as it saddens us. In itself, it is quite ruthless (because intentionless, literally mindless), a shadowy, cosmic agitation of nonconscious tremors and gleams.
The clause (I repeat) keeps coming back to me, and I am not sure why.