not the surface of action but the pulse of thought
I’ve come upon yet another example of solitude from Virginia Woolf, that writing virago who went from novels to essays to diary, on to letters, cycling back into fiction and nonfiction, an endless round of sentences for something like forty years. It sometimes seems, wearyingly, that she said just about everything a person could say about the life of the mind. She was aware that she and her contemporaries at the dawn of what we call modernism were breaking with narrative tradition at some cost. She says about this new kind of writing that describes not the surface of action but the pulse of thought, “I have to create the whole thing afresh for myself each time.
~ Patricia Hampl, The Art of the Wasted Day (Penguin Publishing Group. April 17, 2018)
