Virginia Woolf at Seventeen: The Warboys Journal Two

In a St. Ives secondhand bookstore I purchased LOGIC: OR, THE Right Use of REASON WITH A Variety of Rules To Guard Against ERROR in the AFFAIRS of RELIGION and HUMAN LIFE as well as in the Sciences, by the Late Reverend & Learned Isaac Watts, DD. I care nothing for its LOGIC but bought it for its binding & now am pasting over every REASON & RULE my own journal pages. Resplendent, tooled calf imparts such dignity.

~

I remain stunned by the flatness of the Fens. Today, from the slight elevation of my bicycle seat I could see the broad ditch that crosses the land for miles, straight as a yard measure. The water it holds is brown & perhaps in winter it slices the Fens like a dark scar. But today that inevitable disfigurement was softened by reeds and a haze of white moths. Pale reeds, white moths—a seam line dissolving quite beautifully as it stretched away from me.

~

My pen is rather unwell at present. I practice my penmanship to rouse it.

Long ago there was some question which I do not now remember . . .

Long ago there . . .

This curiously sensual love of all that is . . .

Long . . .

Long went the days . . .

~

I am happy to say that my pages describing a dismal, endless, rain-spattered picnic have covered entirely Watts’ chapter on “The Origin or Causes of Equivocal Words.”

write wright right rite

rein reign rain

~

Autumn has come to Warboys. There is that mellow clearness in the air, which softens & matures the land & the men’s faces who till it.

The woods decay, the woods decay &
fall; the vapours weep their burden to the ground
Man only comes & tills the earth & lies beneath
& after many a summer dies the swan.
This I . . .
This I write in the year of a . . .

~

I met a Fen funeral coming back from Warboys, 5 bakers’ carts & a corn cart, all filled with people dressed in deep mourning. For at least a mile, down a straight, white road, their small procession crawled toward me & then passed me in absolute silence to disappear into the heart of the Fens. I dreamt of those people last night & the vast sky above the flatness & the wind blowing blue spaces around the clouds. Today is the 4th of September. This landscape contains such bleakness. Nevertheless I own it is a joy to me to be set for a time upon it.

~

“In all your distributions,” Dr. Watts tells me, “observe the nature of things with great exactness . . . to gain a clear and distinct idea of passion . . .”

Over his words I am now pasting six carts, one long, white road, blue spaces within a cloud-crowded sky, a bit of joy, & a single day in time. How long will it be, I wonder, until the fabric that divides us crumbles & my sentences end what his began?

The nature of things . . . crawled toward me

The Right Use of Reason . . . stretched away from me

Logic . . . was softened by reeds and a haze of white moths

A variety of Rules . . . passed me in absolute silence