The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf

Books at Bedtime by Calming Anxiety The mark on the wall by Virginia Woolf Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw So now I think of the fire, the steady film of the yellow light upon the page of my book. The three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mental piece. Yes, it must have been the wintertime and we must had just finished our tea but I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coal and that old fancy of crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind and I thought of the cavalcade of red nights riding up from the side of the black rock rather to my leaf, the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark black upon the white wall about six or seven inches above the mental piece. How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object lifting it a little away as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly and then leave it.

If that mark was made by an ale it can't have been for a picture it must have been for a miniature the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls powdered dusted cheeks and lips like red carnation a fraud of course for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way an old picture for an old room that is the sort of people they were very interesting people and I think of them so often in such queer places because one will never see them again never know what happened to Nick they wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture so he said and he was in the process of saying that that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of a suburban villa as one rush is passed in the train but as for that mark I'm not sure about it I don't believe it was made by an ale after all it was too big, too round I might get up but if I got up and looked at it 10 to 1 I shouldn't be able to say for certain because once a thing is done no one ever knows how it happened oh dear me, the mystery of life the inaccuracy of thought the ignorance of humanity to show how very little control of our possessions we have what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime beginning but that seems almost the most mysterious of losses what cat would know what rat would nibble three pale blue canisters of bookbinding tongs then there were the birdcaters the iron hoops, the steel skates the queen and cold scuttle the baguettell board the hand organ orgon and jewels too opals and emeralds they lie about the roots of turnips what a scraping pairing affair it is to be for sure the wonder is that I've any clothes on my back that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment why? if one wants to compare life to anything one must liken it to being blown through the tube at 50 miles an hour landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair shot out at the feet of God entirely naked tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office with one's hair flying back like the tail of a racel yes that seems to express the rapidity of life the perpetual waste and repair also casual also haphazard but after life the slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower as it turns over the loozy to one with purple and red light why? after all should one not be born there is one is born here helpless speechless unable to focus one's eyesight groping at the roots of the grass at the toes of the giants as for saying which are trees and which are men and women or whether there are such things that one won't be in a condition to do for 50 years or so there will be nothing but spaces of light and dark intersected by thick stalks and rather higher up perhaps rose-shaped blocks of an indistinct colour dim pinks and blues which will as time goes on become more definite become I don't know what and yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all it may even be caused by some round black substance such as a small rose-le left over from the summer and I not being a very vigilant housekeeper look at the dust on the mantelpiece for example the dust which so they say buried Troy three times over only fragments of pots utterly refusing an eyelet as one can believe the tree outside the window taps very gently on the pain I want to think quietly calmly, spatiously never to be interrupted never to have to rise from my chair to sleep easily from one thing to another without any sense of hostility or obstacle I want to sink deeper and deeper away from the surface with its hard, separate facts to steady myself let me catch hold of the first idea that passes Shakespeare well he will do as well as another a man who sat himself solidly in an armchair and looked into the fire so a shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high heaven down through his mind he lent his forehead on his hand and perhaps looking in through the open door for this scene supposed to take place on a summer's evening but how dull this is this historical fiction it doesn't interest me at all I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself for those of a pleasantist thoughts and very frequent even in the minds of modest, miscolored people who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises they are not thoughts directly praising oneself that is the beauty of them they are thoughts like this and then I came into the room they were discussing botany I said how I'd seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the side of an old house in Kingsway the seed, I said, must have been sown in the rain of Charles I what flowers grew in the rain of Charles I first I asked but I don't remember the answer tall flowers with purple tassels to them perhaps and so it goes on all the time I'm dressing up the figure of myself for my own mind lovingly stealthily not openly adoring it but if I did that I should catch myself out and stretch my hand at once for a book in self protection indeed it is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous or to unlike the original to be believed in any longer or is it not so very curious after all is it a matter of great importance suppose the looking glass smashes the image disappears and the romantic figure with the green of the forest depths all about it is there no longer but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people what an airless shadow a bald prominent world it becomes a world not to be lived in as we face each other in omnibuses and on the ground trains we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness the gleam of glassiness in our eyes and the novelist in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number those of the depths they will explore those the phantoms they will pursue leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories taking a knowledge of it for granted as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps but these generalizations are very worthless the military sound of the word is enough it recalls leading articles cabinet ministers a whole class of things indeed which as a child no one thought the thing itself the standard thing the real thing from which one could not the parts say that the risk of nameless damn nation generalizations bring back somehow sunday in London sunday afternoon walks sunday lunchens and also waves of speaking of the dead clothes and habits like the habit of sitting altogether in one room until a certain hour although nobody liked it there was a rule for everything the rule of tablecloths that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments marked upon them such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces tablecloth of a different kind where not real tablecloth how shocking and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things sunday lunchens sunday walks country houses and tablecloths were not entirely real were indeed half-benton and the damn nation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom what now takes the place of those things I wonder those real standard things men perhaps should you be a woman the masculine point of view which governs our lives which sets the standard which establishes whittaker's table of presidency which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom to many men and women which soon one may hope will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go the mahogany side-bones and the land see a prince gods and devils hell and so forth leaving us all within intoxicating sense of illegitimate freedom if freedom exists in certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to object from the wall nor is it entirely circular I cannot be sure but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip on the wall it would at some certain point mount and descend a small tumulus a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the south-downs which are, they say either tombs or camps of the tomb I should prefer them to be tombs desiring melancholy like most English people and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf there must be some book about it some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name what sort of a man is an antiquary I wonder retired kernels for the most part I dare say leading parties of aged laborers to the top here examining clots of earth and stone and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy which, being opened at breakfast time gives them a feeling of importance and a feeling of comparison of arrowheads necessitates cross-country journeys to the country towns and a agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives who wish to make plum and jam to clean out the study and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension while the kernel himself philosophic in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question it is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp and being opposed indicts a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child but of the camp and that arrowhead there which is now in the case of the local museum together with the foot of a Chinese murderous a handful of Elizabethan nails a great many-tuda clay pipes a piece of aromain pottery and the wine glass that Nelson drank out of proving I rarely don't know what no, no nothing is true nothing is known and if I were there to get up at this very moment and ascertain what the mark on the wall is really what shall we say? the head of a gigantic old nail driven in 200 years ago which is now owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemates reveal its head above the coat of paint and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white walled violet room what should I gain?

knowledge? matter the third speculation I can think sitting still as well as standing up and what is knowledge what are our learned men who saved the descendants of witches and hermits who crouched in caves and in woods, broon herbs interrogating true mice and writing down the language of the stars and the less we honour them as our superstitions dwindle and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases yes one could imagine a very pleasant world a quiet, spacious world with the flowers so red and blue in the open field a world without professors or specialists or housekeepers with the profiles of policemen a world which one could slice with one's thought as a fish slice as the water with his fin grazing the stems of the water linings hanging suspended over nests of white sear how peaceful it is down here rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters with their sudden gleams of light and their reflection if it were not for Witteska's Almanac if it were not for the table of precedency I must jump up and see myself for what the mark on the wall really is a nail, a roselief, a crack in the wood here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation this train of thought she perceives is threatening mere waste of energy even some collision with reality for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Wittaker's table of precedency the archbishop of counterbree is followed by the Lord High Chancellor the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the archbishop of your everybody follows somebody such is the philosophy of Wittaker and the great thing is to know who follows who Wittaker knows and let that so nature councils comfort you instead of engaging you and if you cannot be comforted if you must shatter this hour of peace think of the mark on the wall I understand nature's game her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain hence I suppose comes our slight contempt for men of action we assume who don't think still there's no harm in putting a full stop to one's disagreeable thoughts by looking at the mark on the wall indeed now that I've fixed my eye upon it I feel that I've grasped a plank in the sea I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two archbishop's and the Lord high-chancellor the shadows of shades here is something definite something real thus waking from a midnight dream of horror one hastily turns on the light and lies quesant worshipping the chest of draw worshipping solidity worshipping reality worshipping the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours it comes from a tree and trees grow and we don't know how they grow for years and years they grow without paying any attention to us in the meadows in forests and by the sides of rivers all things one likes to think about the cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons they paint rivers so green that when a more hen dives when expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out and of the water beetles slowly raising domes of mud upon the bed of the river I like to think of the tree itself first the clothes dry sensation of being wood then the grinding of the storm then the slow, delicious ooze of sap I like to think of it too on winter's night standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled nothing tender exposed to the eye and bullets of the moon a naked mouth upon an earth that goes tumbling tumbling all night long the song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it as they make laborious progresses up the creases of the bark or sun themselves upon the thin green awning of the leaves and look straight in front of them with diamond cut red eyes one by one the fibers snap beneath the immense cold pressure of earth then the last storm comes and falling the highest branches drive deep into the ground again even so life isn't done with there are a million patient watchful lives still for a tree all over the world in bedrooms and ships on the pavement lining rooms where men and women sit after tea smoking cigarettes it is full of peaceful thoughts happy thoughts this tree I should like to take each one separately but something is getting in the way where was I? what has it all been about? a tree a river the downs whittaker's almanac the fields of asphodel I can't remember a thing everything's moving falling slipping vanishing there is a vast upheaval of matter someone is standing over me and saying I'm going out to buy a newspaper yes though it's no good buying newspapers nothing ever happens curse this wall god damn this wall all the same I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall ah the mark on the wall it was a snail