How does one pause during the party scene?

I have gone through Eggers phases, Shakespeare phases and Irving phases and etc. But I've never felt a kinship like Virginia Woolf. Last night I finished Dalloway. I read To The Lighthouse in Spain, Madrid. There is nothing I love better, really almost nothing, except reading a good novel in a foriegn country. There is a bubble that exists in the language barrier I suppose. A bubble is good place to read. In a bed with absolutely nothing to do. Being sick, being isolated. These are the best venues for reading, rather than the intermittent subway ride, the 15 minute wait for the doctor to come, the doctor doesn't come... but one could walk around Westside Market for half an hour. It is relaxing and they have the most samples in New York City. Save Union Square Whole Foods. But Westside is more relaxing, the samples are always the same. Someone's creative concoctions that took thought, years of practice and sampling. The opinions of others who meant something to said concoction maker. The many people who sampled, the overriding suggestion to ass more mayonnaise, more cheese, more sour cream, whatever adds substance and comfort and, over-all fat to the spreads with the rice cakes in Westside Market. You can see if they have it from the street. So there is less pressure to buy something, to commit to going in. But that is part of the fun, isn't it? I really think if Woolf was writing today on the Upper West Side, she would use Westside Market as a setting, or maybe just a place to walk around...sampling. Would VW sample?



Anyway Dalloway. The greatest thing to read in college. Screw that. The best thing to read right exactly now in this moment that I work in Upper East Side retail. The novel instructs us on the dimensions and fabrics of humanity that thread the conscious memory whether we are a person who black-cards a thousand dollars of athletic apparel, or sleeps in a hallway in East New York's finest forgotten housing, or shops for tickets, a way out, a travel abroad program, anything that mimics a disappearance with the glamour of a life truly lived. What is is about being somewhere new that eradicates purpose and obfuscates banality with the frosting of struggle? If there is even a light-breeze-ripple of pain in your soul, there is a character or at least a paragraph for you in Dalloway.

And Woolf does it. She forces the reader to see the shared memories of the soulless socialite, the PTSD soldier, the complacent revolutionary, etc. There is no difference when we are all perspective and no science, no understanding of matter and atoms. There is just a shared obsession with memory and anxiety over life's idiosyncrasies and the frequency with which we slip into their rivulets. They may differ from person to person, but it is obsession we all share, I myself am inebriated with it.



"Virginia, you have an obligation to your own sanity."
"There is no such obligation."