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by Erin James

To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy.
-Virginia Woolf, "Montaigne"

It was the end of August. I was eight years old and my mom, dad, brother, uncle, and I had gathered on the front porch of our lakeside cottage in Indiana. All day a thunderstorm raged outside. The rain swept across the lake in sheets from the north, flooding the boathouse and drenching the sheets and towels my mother and I had hung on the clothesline the night before. My brother and I had gone through every board game in the house and worn out the deck of cards, so he told me we were going to play catch, snatched up a tennis ball, and headed from the porch into the main part of the house. I, four years his junior, followed.

It is here, first, that I feel I must pause; for just now, in this event as I have begun to recount it, there seem to be numerous forces at work. The way in which I remember the beginnings of this incident, the method by which I have started to put it into words, speaks to the rain that drove my family and me into the house and onto the porch, to my brother who effortlessly coaxed me into one game of monopoly after another, to the ease with which I complied with his silent instructions to follow him into the house for a game of catch. My actions seem so driven by things and people external to me that recalling my eight-year-old self has surprised and startled, unsettled me. In allowing this sensation of shock to play through my mind, I am instantly drawn to Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past," her version of a memoir in which she brings the places she grew up in, the people she knew, and a handful of the experiences that shaped her over the course of her life back into existence for us to read, perhaps eventually to come to know and be shaped by ourselves.

Woolf is interested in this shaping and molding, the malleability, the instabilities of human existence that drive our daily lives; and so she sets out to explore and examine the power and influence of the forces in the early, formative years of one's life. She writes that somehow into the space and time of one's childhood

must be brought, too, the sense of movement and change. Nothing remained stable long. One must get the feeling of everything approaching and then disappearing, getting large, getting small, passing at different rates of speed past the little creature; one must get the feeling that made her press on. . .driven without her being able to stop it, or to change it. . .That is what is indescribable, that is what makes all images too static, for no sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered. (79)

When I recall how my brother and I began to throw the ball to one another, back and forth, back and forth, the pulsation and succession of Woolf's thoughts almost seems to begin to align itself with, to speak louder through the rhythm of, our simple game of catch. Her own words, "approaching, disappearing, getting large, getting small. . .driven without her being able to stop it" hint at the flux, the unrest of childhood, the peculiar burden of any particular moment pressing upon a child from all directions, the voices of those around her sounding decibels louder than her own. Woolf says that this movement and change are indescribable, but she has already begun to bring us so very close.

But I shall continue: after five minutes of tossing the ball back and forth, my brother began throwing it harder and farther with each toss, forcing me into one corner of the room. His next toss headed directly towards a glass vase that stood on the left side of the tall oak chest by the front door. As the ball zoomed towards the vase, I lurched sideways to try to catch it; but as I caught the ball, I struck the vase, sending it crashing onto the hardwood floor, splintering it into a thousand pieces. Tears began streaming down my face as I looked from the broken vase to the blood flowing from the back of my right hand and back to the vase again, my mind whirling. My uncle stormed into the room, his eyes soaking up the display. He started screaming.

He had lost both his hands in an accident when he was fifteen, a garage science experiment gone awry. He now wore hook-like devices that he could operate with the muscles of his upper arms and shoulders. Flailing across the room towards me, he was terrifying. He came closer and barreled into me, sending me careening into the wall before ripping the tennis ball out of my hand. I remember my brother standing there, mouth agape, as I began to apologize over, over. The vase was one of a pair that had belonged to my uncle's grandmother. He pointed his hook at the matching vase directly opposite the now empty space where the other had stood and bellowed that one was worthless without the other. He grabbed the remaining vase down off the chest and forced it into my hands, telling me that I should break it, too. "At least they would match," he said. As I stood there trembling, clutching the vase, my mother came into the room. My uncle was cursing and swinging his arms too close to my body. My mother took the vase from my hands and put it firmly back in its place atop the chest, grabbed her purse, grabbed me by the arm, and we left.

Upon recalling this scene I feel a pressing need to figure out why I have done so. I sense there is a reason that this experience, this affair intertwining me, my uncle, and his grandmother's vase, remained so tightly knit and rose to the surface in such a vast and cluttered sea as memory. I see myself in my mind's eye standing there eleven years ago, still, unflinching, clutching the second vase, and I want so badly to get closer to her, to pull the threads connecting my eight-year-old self to the woman writing these words today ever tighter so that perhaps I may better hear what she has, if anything, to tell me. But I cannot make her talk; I must be patient. And this listening, this risk of realizing, is not easy.

But somehow by remembering, reflecting upon this intricate and restless scene, the myriad forces at play within it, I feel I might be able to get closer to my self of eleven years ago, to re-inhabit this childhood space as she did. Woolf begins to steer us closer to the movement within the space of her childhood, the forces that were the groundwork of all her younger self knew, felt, and experienced, as she explores what she terms the "invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life," external influences which, like magnets, "attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that" ("A Sketch of the Past" 80). She reveals that these presences can take the form of individual people, society, "what other people say and think, the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves," that it is by such invisible presences that the "'subject of the memoir' is tugged this way and that every day of his life; it is they that keep him in position" (80).

It is by means of her evolving relationship with and curiosity about these invisible presences and their influence on her, that Woolf moves us from the turbulence of childhood into the shapes that her young adulthood and later life will eventually take. She furthers her assertion that these forces, that this movement and change are "indescribable" and cannot be communicated with words when trying to write about the past as she begins to attempt to shed light on the invisible presences in her life, presences that followed her closely, that she kept near at hand into adulthood. She elucidates their complexity when she urges us to "consider what immense forces society brings to play upon each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade; and also from class to class" ("Sketch" 80). But how can we locate and describe something that was tugging us this way and that, yet kept us fixed in one position? How can we lay a finger on our past selves, tossed about, moved at once here and there while a stream of invisible presences was whirling around us, propelling us forward?

***

It was the middle of August. My mom, dad, brother, and I had pulled over at Little Sandy's Truck Stop, the main attraction in Bruceton Mills, West Virginia. We were on our way to Indiana, and my mother and I were waiting together in the car while my dad filled up the gas tank and my brother cleaned the car windows. I was sitting in the back; she, up front in the passenger seat, was studying a handful of maps. While we waited I leaned forward to ask her how much longer it would be until we started seeing road signs for Indiana. She slid the maps back into the glove box and asked me if I was thirsty, already starting to pour some lemonade from the thermos we kept in the car. As I took the cup from her hand, she reminded me that we were stopping in Ohio to spend the night at Uncle Rodney's house before all five of us drove up to the Lake together. I remember noticing her shoulders stiffen, hearing her voice harden as she spoke and poured some lemonade for herself. I felt the edge in her voice pulling us closer together, a strange, almost disturbing feeling settling over both of us, as though someone else, someone uninvited, had entered the car.

I was quiet for a few minutes as I toyed with, initially resisted, the mounting desire to ask my mother if she remembered. Several more minutes went by before I edged forward, asked her if she, too, was thinking about how Uncle Rodney had gotten so mad when I broke the vase three summers before, how she and I had driven into town and hadn't come back until after dark. Her gaze dropped down into her lap, to the cup between her hands, before she looked out her window towards the highway. I wanted so badly to know what she was thinking right then, why she didn't take even a sip of her lemonade the whole time we waited in the car, why she turned her face away from me at my mention of that incident; why, for the first time, I began to sense something about that experience that I could not put my finger on, a pulling sensation perhaps, the feeling that my mother and I were being drawn back to it, and that there was nothing we could do to stop it.

But she didn't remain silent very long. After a few minutes she turned her face from the window and looked back down at the cup between her hands. Her breathing was slow and even, her shoulders still rigid. She looked up. "Did I ever tell you your uncle had been drinking that day?"

In recalling this moment of revelation I am having a hard time getting close to how I felt, what was racing through my brain as I sat there in the backseat, trying to digest this new piece of information that had been shoved my way. What I see most clearly as I look back is simply how persistent the experience was, how prompt it was in its reappearance, how it had momentarily engulfed both my mother and me, how within moments of my mother's mention of my uncle, her revelation of what had taken place beyond the reach of my eight-year-old eyes, there the scene was before me; there was my uncle with us in the car.

***

I am drawn back to "A Sketch of the Past" and Woolf's continuing endeavor to investigate the nature and influence of the forces and invisible presences at play within her past. When she warns us that "if we cannot analyze these invisible presences, we know very little of the subject of the memoir," I begin to sense that there is a greater connection between the self, -the subject of the memoir,-and the forces simultaneously encircling, leaving impressions on and transforming the self, that perhaps to point to one is to reveal the other (80). It seems that as we attempt to describe and convey the nature of our childhood experiences and those individuals who influenced us, we might be able to hint at our selves, our own nature, our own multiplicity and inconsistencies; we might get closer to what can only be revealed through our attempt to describe our relation to and interpretation of our experiences. But recently I have begun to wonder whether a single experience, with its unique combination and configuration of sights, sounds, smells, feelings, sensations, is one of the most difficult entities to describe, to illustrate in language. It seems that the underpinning, the forces residing behind and surrounding the who, what, when, and where,-the facts which inform the experience in part-are what we need to shed light on to bring an experience back to life, but they are also what Woolf terms "indescribable," that which makes "all images too static" (79). Then, I ask, how to tell the truth about, to communicate and express the power of a past experience? How to learn and speak this inexpressible language so that we can come to a still greater understanding beyond our selves and our experiences?

In thinking about how to tend to the past, how to bring myself to the experiences that have accumulated and been stored as images in my memory, I have started to question whether or not there is a useful methodology by which to do so, a route by means of which I could have better access to a former experience in its entirety, a process that would better allow me to work to try to make the past present. If there is something indescribable bound up with, at work within an experience other than the facts of the incident themselves, then perhaps it is precisely this something,-more slippery, more difficult to pin down and give a name-that drives the experience, that makes it cohere in our minds year after year, that we crave to connect with once again. If we are in pursuit of something that encompasses the specific rhythm and movement, the forces and presences that propel the incident onward and outward in our minds and keep it fixed there, infinitely shifting and changing shape, then to reason out and recall, to merely set the mind to work exhuming pieces and facts of our history-these actions involve only one ingredient in the formula, so to speak, for re-living the past, for making the past present. Our precious dates, names, times, and places are important, but not enough; they lie on the periphery of the experience. It is memory working in tandem with imagination that allows us to re-enter and feel again the experience in full as we felt it the first time.

***

Cardinal John Henry Newman begins Discourse VII of The Idea of a University by reminding us of a conclusion he has just come to in his previous discourses: that the cultivation and development of the intellect is an end which may "reasonably be pursued for its own sake." He then probes deeper to investigate the "nature of that cultivation, or what that cultivation consists in" (303). Upon reading and considering Newman's assertion that "truth of whatever kind is the proper object of the intellect; its cultivation then lies in fitting it to apprehend and contemplate truth," my mind is most fixed on this "truth of whatever kind" (303). If this truth-which Newman incites us to pursue-can be of any sort, I feel most strongly pulled in the direction of Woolf's mention of truth in her essay on Montaigne in The Common Reader. She begins by giving us a little of Montaigne himself, a few of his own words, through her illustration of an encounter between Montaigne and a portrait of the King of Sicily:

Once at Bar-le-Duc Montaigne saw a portrait which Rene, King of Sicily, had painted of himself, and asked, 'Why is it not, in like manner, lawful for every one to draw himself with a pen, as he did with a crayon?' Off-hand one might reply, Not only is it lawful, but nothing could be easier. Other people may evade us, but our own features are almost too familiar. Let us begin. And then, when we attempt the task, the pen falls from our fingers; it is a matter of profound, mysterious, and overwhelming difficulty. (58)

Woolf then lures us deeper into the web that she is spinning by declaring that in the whole of literature the art of "talking of oneself, following one's own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection" belonged to one man only: to Montaigne ("Montaigne" 58). But she soon complicates these statements in which she had begun to outline Montaigne's seemingly innate knack for navigating and mapping the soul, for "draw[ing] himself with a pen." She forces our eyes open in shock when she reveals that, in fact, "to tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy," that Montaigne's effort to "write himself down, to communicate, to tell the truth. . .was a 'rugged road, more than it seems'" (59).

And this truth, the truth about one's self, inextricably intertwined with one's past selves, is on my mind as I begin to let Newman's words work me over and play through my thinking about the particulars, perhaps too, the hazards of this "'rugged road"' that I am in pursuit of. The work of apprehending and contemplating the truth of which Newman writes seems somehow connected in my mind with the difficulty of telling the truth about, of discovering oneself. Newman pushes forward:

Now the intellect in its present state. . .does not discern truth intuitively, or as a whole. We know, not by a direct and simple vision, not at a glance, but, as it were, by piecemeal and accumulation, by a mental process, by going round an object, by the comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation, of many partial notions, by the employment, concentration, and joint action of many faculties and exercises of mind. Such a union and concert of the intellectual powers, such an enlargement and development, such a comprehensiveness, is necessarily a matter of training. (303)

As he urges us to go "round an object," I am struck by Newman's conviction that we do not know objects, any objects, be they people, works of art, pieces of literature, the stories of our past, at first glance, that such comprehensiveness and greater understanding is not mere happenstance, that such an understanding is "necessarily a matter of training. . .the work of discipline and habit" (303). In the realm of memory and experience, perhaps the "comparison, the combination, the mutual correction, the continual adaptation" of such memories as I earlier addressed is what may allow me to pursue an understanding of both the individual experiences themselves, and the way the two experiences have come to converse with one another in my mind. And I wonder, too, if it is only by constantly comparing, combining, mutually correcting, and continually adapting these two instances that I will be able to attend to them fully, to sift through them and sort them out in writing, to listen to them once and for all. I am also surprised when I take note, yet again, of the eleven years during which this evolution has taken place, is still taking place; I begin to sense that this training of which Newman writes is not a schooling of the discrete, finite sort, that the pursuit of "truth of whatever kind," especially the truth about oneself, is not a course clearly marked with a fixed start and end, that it is indeed a "'rugged road, more than it seems'" ("Montaigne" 59).

***

Then one might ask: why bother? Why spend time pursuing, chasing, running ourselves round in circles trying to remember things we have seen and experienced, people we have known, places we have visited, books we have read? And is it truly possible to recreate these events and experiences and re-inhabit them as we did the first time so that we may come away with some sort of greater understanding of ourselves, of our past selves? In order to re-experience something, do the conditions out of which the event initially arose need to be reconstructed exactly in order to stir up the same emotional response? In "The Functions of Literature in War-Time," E.M. Forster argues for the role of literature as a stabilizing factor during the turbulence and insecurity that characterize times of war. He claims that one need not choose between reading a book or serving at the front lines, that literature can be justified in another manner: by our remembering it. Forster suggests that in place of reading books during war-time we should "remember what we've read, re-think, re-feel," that memory is the key to preservation during periods of destruction, that books will "survive in the hour of war" (177). With regard to my questions concerning the degree to which something can be fully re-experienced, Forster writes that indeed "the past has gone, it is true, and nothing resembling it will ever return in our lifetime. But we can still re-think it and re-feel, and by doing so can face the present" (176).

And Forster's use and particular vision of the "present," the idea that moving backward can help us move forward, that moving forward may indeed necessitate this recursive motion, intrigues me. I slowly begin to grasp that even though nothing resembling our past will return to us in the precise manner in which it originally unfolded, we may return to it. We have the capacity to reflect on, to scrutinize our perspective of a particular experience versus the experience in its entirety, to investigate what our perception of the experience and the impression it leaves on us can tell us about ourselves, the way we "see" and experience things, how we are likely to see and experience things in the future. And indeed the issue of how we bring ourselves to "face the present" is showing itself to be of extraordinary importance, for it is tied to how we have brought ourselves to face our past experiences; and we cannot acknowledge or even begin to understand the very things we say, think, do, feel, and believe in today, or what we will tomorrow, if we do not acknowledge thoughts, feelings, and beliefs that have come before, if we ignore the existence and import of yesterday and how it bears upon what follows. When Forster writes that "books do not cease to exist because we have no time to read them," it would seem that even though a book has been read and put back on the shelf, just as yesterday has already been spent, both persist; and it is part of our task to acknowledge this perseverance, to let ourselves be reminded that things and people of the past-as books are, -fail to be erased by virtue of our inattention (177).

In the same essay Forster also makes a distinction between the ways in which literature affects us. He posits that literature can influence us in two ways: directly and indirectly, and that the direct influence of literature is "slight," that there is a degree to which we choose what to read and understand, that within any piece of literature we will "find just what [we] want" (179). He writes otherwise of literature's indirect influence. Forster claims that indirect influence cannot be made known by pointing to a particular passage or character, that it transforms us instead "by its general impression," that it will leave us with a "general sense that we have been in a world much greater than our own" (179). To embark on this voyage, then, to set foot into a realm beyond the temporal confines of our physical existence, beyond the terrain we ourselves have walked upon, to work for a chance to get hold of a glimpse of more than we have physically been given the chance to see, to set out on this journey that literature will allow us to take if only we would let ourselves be led, seems like an invitation, or a challenge, rather, that is more than worthy of accepting. I sense that Woolf's belief in the capacity that literature possesses to move, shape, and transform us lies in a similar vein as Forster's. She writes in "Montaigne" that "to communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province" (64). I begin to wonder whether there is more than one route to this world that is greater than our own, that lies just beyond our own time and province, this world of which both Forster and Woolf speak.

As I shuffle through the images stored in my memory, I am aware that they are mostly images from scenes as I perceived them, as I experienced them. In reaching back to the specific episode involving me, my uncle, and his grandmother's vase, the first images to come into view are my recollections of the rain, the growing pile of half-finished board games, my brother trotting off into the house with me in tow; and it is then that I first sense how the movement and change of those particular moments, of that particular day, influenced me. But in going round the scene and reaching back a second time, this time taking with me the image of my mother in the car in West Virginia, staring at the cup between her hands, "Did I ever tell you your uncle had been drinking that day?," I get a sense of how my uncle bowed under and reacted to the forces of that day in his own way; and much more of the scene, what was then just beyond the reach of my eight-year-old eyes, brightens into view. I see the way in which my brother and I had staved off the day's ennui,-the unrelenting rain keeping us indoors, -with board games and a game of catch; but this time I see, too, how my uncle had tried to fend off his cabin fever with a bottle. I feel as though I am suspended above the scene, hovering and watching, then at once soaring above, plunging below, capable of moving around within the experience. This time I can choose to inhabit angles of vision other than my own and watch the scene unfold yet again, again in my mind in a different manner than I originally experienced and perceived it. Cause and effect as I originally understood them can be put on hold; the dialogue and plot can be tinkered with and refined. My version, my initial experiencing of the episode then combines, sometimes contradicts, and begins to overlap with what I can imagine in memory using knowledge I have accrued over time since the experience itself took place. As soon as this begins to happen the experience swells; it is amplified and begins to multiply infinitely, and I am at once in a world not completely mine, a world greater than my own. And it was not until I began to write that I realized this eleven-year-old experience was not actually eleven years old, that it has been made new each time I have remembered it, each time I perceived it in a different manner, that it had since been growing, breeding with other experiences and memories, propagating outwards in my mind for years, most of the time unbeknownst to me, that the shape which the presences of my brother, uncle, and mother had taken that day were still swarming, buzzing around me, waiting for me to notice them again, waiting for me to listen.

***

But now, as I am trying to understand the change I underwent upon being offered up this new perspective, this new information about my uncle's doings that day, I cannot help but question the impact of my mother's words on my understanding of what I had felt and experienced that day late in August eleven years ago. Did learning why he reacted the way he did lessen my initial fear of his flailing arms, ease my mother's grip on my arm? This bleeding, this washing together of layers of memory has brought to light a difficulty that involves more than differentiating between, keeping track of the multiple versions of this experience that I have accrued over time, each one often instigated by some revelation of information that changed the color of the original experience. The difficulty lies closer to the fact that in remembering we often recall our younger, childhood selves as they are remembered by our selves of say, a few years, a decade ago, as if we need a middleman to tap into our own childhood. The peril in this is that our new, more informed versions of our past can slowly begin to take the place of the past itself if we are not careful. Until I began to make an effort to recall and write down, to express as closely as I could what my eight-year-old self felt under the weight of that specific experience, until I stepped outside of what I learned and factored into that day over time and let those three, simple images flash before my eyes: the rain, the growing pile of half-finished board games, my brother trotting off into the house with me in tow, I did not realize that I had, since I was twelve, almost never recalled the initial episode without factoring in my uncle's drunkenness, even though I had no notion of it at the time the incident occurred. And I have found that it takes less work to do so, that it is easier only to think back seven years to my twelve-year-old self, to let the new, altered, drunken and at times more easily explainable version of the incident from her perspective account for the incident itself. But we mustn't give in, for the task at hand seems more crucial than trying not to forget our past experiences as they originally unfolded; it is in trying not to forget our very selves.

Expression in any form helps us, sometimes forces us, to try to understand and come to terms with our experiences, to face them head-on. In turn we may begin to recognize and feel how a particular experience shaped and still shapes us; while we mull over that moment, while we poke and prod and try to make sense of it, it does the same to us: it is a game of reciprocity that we play with the past. It fascinates me that something that took place eleven years ago can still make me shudder or squirm and clench my fists, can make me uneasy. This lack of control is wrenching; and if I don't feel up to a confrontation of this sort, I often file my uncle and the broken vase away into some neglected repository in my mind, knowing full well that the experience will eventually resurface, that it will have to come up for air sometime.

But this inability to control how I feel also points to something at once terrible and wonderful; it is scary and reassuring for it is a hint, a sign, that something much larger and grander, something stronger and more powerful than myself, than all of us, does indeed exist. I crave to connect more deeply with this presence; however, I am still afraid of it. I long not to shy away from, not to be scared of feeling the full weight of this single moment of my past pressing upon me from all directions. I want at any time to be able to let a particular experience tackle me and wrestle me to the ground, interrogate me, rough me up a bit, simply so I can see what I am really made of. This is what working to express an experience can do, if I let it. In tapping into the past, in discovering how to "get [myself] again attached to it," a switch will be flipped on in a dark, dusty corner of my mind, illuminating the experience, and maybe even hinting at how it wants to be expressed (67).

One must also consider that in order to express an experience in the most precise manner possible, the language of one's expression must become more than the language of words; one must internalize, begin to think and feel in, and eventually employ the language of emotion, the only dialect that permeates all experience, that will not die off when those who speak it are extinct. The experiences of which we write are larger and more complex than, and exist outside of our perception of them; therefore our words must be able to point toward and convey something larger than themselves, the forces at work between them. Understanding and speaking this tongue is not simply a means by which we can express ourselves and create things that will last; this more sensual, more moody, more provocative language lies just behind the words themselves and has the capacity to reveal to us parts of ourselves that we did not know existed, that when acknowledged will allow usto last, parts of ourselves which have been buried for so long that we have forgotten they ever existed.

I have been mulling over the idea that perhaps rooted somewhere within the movement and change that Woolf hints at lies the beginnings of my desire to write things down. Her words grip me with a sense of dread as my eyes move over them: "No sooner has one said this was so, than it was past and altered" (79). No sooner do we open our mouths than the "phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on its tail" ("Montaigne" 59). But this dread can be transformed, a little trepidation is just what we need to shift into gear; a sense of relief, perhaps liberation, can be spied following close on its tail if we take the appropriate measures. In the act of writing we can witness to and make something coherent out of the impressions made and the traces left by this phantom of thought and sensation, this experience, as it moved through our minds and bodies. We solidify it, ground it, but simultaneously release it to be absorbed into other minds and bodies and to be made new once again. And I find that dwelling in and trying to find a way to allay this sense of loss almost always results in a longing to preserve, to renew, to make concrete something that I sense will, in a moment, be past and altered; and this is where I see the lure of expression, the need to write things down. Perhaps my desire to write is a manifestation of my fear of forgetting, of overlooking something simply because I couldn't see it, or was perhaps not even looking for it at the time. Not until long after putting into words the images that constituted the beginnings of that day in Indiana eleven years ago could I even begin to hear what they were saying, could I physically see the forces in that scene as they worked over all of us: my brother, my uncle, my mother, me.

And it is now that I begin to comprehend the difficulty in this seeing, listening. But I sense it is not difficult to look back and listen to these images because they have weakened over time or lost what we can grasp of their meaning; no, it is precisely because they are so deeply rooted and far reaching; it is that they have been there from the start. And in my mind's present state there are so many more images to compete with; my brain is a battlefield of recollections and partial notions, faded memories perhaps left too long in the sun untended. It can be so difficult to hear anything above the din, the noisy chatter of these stored memories, of these images as they converse and cry out in protestation, as they shuffle, trade places, and swim about; but they are there indeed, and they have something to tell me, perhaps something to tell me about myself. So I cannot leave them alone.

And though Woolf declares that movement and change, the constant pitching and heaving that hints at the immense "force of life" which turns an eight-year-old, still and unflinching before her uncle's thrashing arms, into the woman who, eleven years later, is finally ready to hear what she has to say, is what makes "all images too static." But I think this stagnation may be of our own doing, our own inattentiveness (79). And it is in continually "going round an object," in keeping the images and memories that have persisted from the start, that fixed themselves in our minds long before we even knew it, close at hand; it is in pausing and listening, looking backwards while pressing on, glancing at once left and right, rotating about on our own ever-shifting axis, never sitting still, that we can come full circle to begin again.

Works Cited

Forster, E.M. "The Functions of Literature in War-Time."Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings. Ed. George H. Thompson. New York: Liveright, 1971. 176-183.

Newman, John Henry Cardinal. "Literature." The Idea of a University. New York: Doubleday, 1854. 303.

Woolf, Virginia. "Montaigne." The Common Reader. Ed. Andrew McNeillie. New York: Harcourt, 1925. 58-68.

---."A Sketch of the Past." Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1985. 64-159.

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