transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:11] Hi, I'm Jessica Porter, and welcome back to Sleep Magic, a podcast where I help you find the magic of your own mind, helping you to sleep better and live better. Tonight, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Written in 1927 by Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse is about the inner lives of a family and their guests over time, centered around their stays at a summer house by the sea. I mean, that's technically the quote, plot unquote. But really, it's about so much more than that. Through the perspectives of the three main characters, Mrs. Ramsey, her husband, Mr. Ramsey, and the painter, Lily Briscoe, Virginia Woolf explores how people perceive one another. How moments of connection and meaning arise and pass. And how time reshapes everything. It's a quiet, beautiful exploration of life itself. When I started reading from books for Sleep Magic about three years ago, the first thing I read from was To the Lighthouse. Just as I will be tonight. And having read from so many books in the interim, I've really become sensitive to their rhythms and voices. And whether a story has a lulling quality or is more high drama. Now obviously some writers are more sleep friendly than others. But not because they're boring. But because there's a certain hypnotic quality to the writing. And I think, of everything I've read so far, Virginia Woolf's works contain that essence more than any others. Her stories are waking dreams, written by a genius who happened to be a woman, with the rare courage at the time to speak her mind about both the world at large and the inner narrative running through her. And by doing so, she speaks for all of us. She captured human consciousness. So as I read tonight, just tune in with her rhythms and images and the dreamy quality she captures as she crawls into our minds. Now get yourself into a safe and comfortable position, and let's begin. Allow your eyes to close easily and gently. Welcome to your body, to the night, to this time of letting go. Just give yourself permission, maybe even saying to yourself in your mind, yes, to letting go, yes. You are constantly in relationship with your body. You are constantly in relationship with your mind. And at the end of the day, literally and figuratively, you decide to let go. Just say, yes. As you bring your awareness now to your eyelids, I'd like you to imagine that your eyelids are feeling sleepy, heavy. Maybe they are actually sleepy and heavy, but even if they're not, just pretend that they are. And as you allow this heaviness, this sleepiness to take over your eyelids, I'm making the suggestion that your eyelids are so heavy and sleepy, that they simply won't open. So accepting the suggestion that your eyelids will not open, I want you to test them by wiggling your eyebrows while your eyes remain closed. And this is trickery, this is fakery, you're pretending. But pretending is powerful. So, wiggle your eyebrows. Good. Now this lovely, heavy, sleepy feeling around your eyes. You will soon have this feeling throughout your entire body. As it seeps back into your head now, that warm, heavy feeling, flowing back into your brain. Just say yes to your brain being taken over by this lovely, warm, soothing, relaxing feeling. Good, as your head feels very, very heavy on the pillow. Your face is letting go. Your face is softening, relaxing, resting. Maybe your jaw relaxes and drops. Your forehead, softening, smoothing, that feels nice. And now, this warm, relaxed feeling is moving down, down through your neck, and the muscles of your neck are letting go. Their work is over for now. The bed is holding your head. The bed is holding your body. So you can let go, as you take yourself deeper and deeper. And if you've been practicing with me for a while, your body is already flooding itself with relaxation, moving down through your shoulders, down your arms. Allow your arms to feel this lovely heaviness, this lovely, sleepy relaxation. As you imagine the heaviness moving all the way down into your hands, into your fingers. Your arms are relaxing now because their day is done. They're on vacation. As that wonderful, warm feeling is moving down now inside your chest. Just imagine it pouring in like a beautiful, soft mist entering your chest cavity, softening and expanding and opening your inner world. We have bodies, and we use our hands, our arms, our feet, our legs. We look at the outside of our bodies, but we have a rich, deep, powerful body. Inside our torso. We've talked about it as the three brains between our brain in our head, the brain in our heart, and the brain in our gut. This has also been called the Viscera, this internal, sensitive, vital tuning fork. So as this relaxation moves down into your chest and softens you from the inside, and as it moves down now to the middle of your torso, softening from the inside, allow it to move down now deep into your belly, just imagining this lovely mist, softening, relaxing, and opening you on the inside, as the muscles you may hold during the day in your belly are letting go, and your breath drops deeper into your body. And you're being present to yourself. In a soft and gentle way, as you go deeper and deeper. And that warm, relaxed feeling is moving down your legs now. That lovely, heavy, warm feeling moving down your thighs and your calves into your feet and your toes. And as you go deeper and deeper, everything letting go, any sounds that you may hear going on around you will take you deeper and deeper into relaxation. As the sound of my voice is also taking you deeper and deeper into meditation. As you drift, and float, and dream. On your own personal voyage. The Window. Lily Briscoe went on putting away her brushes, looking up, looking down. Looking up, there he was, Mr. Ramsey, advancing towards them, swinging, careless, oblivious, remote. A bit of a hypocrite, she repeated. Oh no, the most sincere of men, the truest. Here he was, the best. But looking down, she thought, he is absorbed in himself. He is tyrannical. He is unjust. And kept looking down, purposely. For only so could she keep steady, staying with the Ramses. Directly, one looked up and saw them. What she called being in love flooded them. They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe, which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them. The birds sang through them. And what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsey bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsey sitting with James in the window, and the cloud moving and the tree bending. How life, from being made up of little separate incidents, which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave, which bore one up and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. Mr. Banks expected her to answer, and she was about to say something criticizing Mrs. Ramsey, how she was alarming, too, in her way, high-handed, or words to that effect. When Mr. Banks made it entirely unnecessary for her to speak by his rapture. For such it was, considering his age turned sixty, and his cleanliness, and his impersonality, and the white scientific coat which seemed to clothe him. For him to gaze, as Lily saw him gazing at Mrs. Ramsey, was a rapture equivalent, Lily felt, to the loves of dozens of young men. And perhaps Mrs. Ramsey had never excited the loves of dozens of young men. It was love, she thought, pretending to move her canvas, distilled and filtered. Love that never attempted to clutch its object. But, like the love which mathematicians bear their symbols or poets their phrases, was meant to be spread over the world and become part of the human gain. So it was, indeed. The world, by all means, should have shared it. Could Mr. Banks have said why that woman pleased him so? Why the sight of her reading a fairy tale to her boy had upon him precisely the same effect as the solution of a scientific problem, so that he rested in contemplation of it? And felt, as he felt when he had proved something absolute about the digestive system of plants, that barbarity was tamed, the reign of chaos subdued. Such a rapture. May Lily Briscoe forget entirely what she had been about to say. It was nothing of importance, something about Mrs. Ramsey. It paled beside this rapture, this silent stare, for which she felt intense gratitude. For nothing so solaced her, eased her of the perplexity of life, and miraculously raised its burdens as this sublime power, this heavenly gift. And one would no more disturb it while it lasted, than break up the shaft of sunlight, lying level across the floor. That people should love like this, that Mr. Bank should feel this for Mrs. Ramsey, she glanced at him, musing, was helpful, was exalting. She wiped one brush after another upon a piece of old rag, menially, on purpose. She took shelter from the reverence which covered all women. She felt herself praised. Let him gaze. She would steal a look at her picture. She could have wept. It was bad. It was bad. It was infinitely bad. She could have done it differently, of course. The colors could have been thinned and faded. The shapes etherealized. That was how Ponceford would have seen it. But then, she did not see it like that. She saw the color burning on a framework of steel. The light of a butterfly's wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that, only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen, never be hung even. And there was Mr. Tansley whispering in her ear, Women can't paint. Women can't write. She now remembered what she'd been going to say about Mrs. Ramsey. She did not know how she would have put it, but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some high handedness. Looking along the level of Mr. Banks' glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped. They could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr. Banks extended over them both. Looking along his beam, she added to it her different ray. Thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people, bowed over her book. The best, perhaps, but also different, too, from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different? And how different? She asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green, which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now. Yet she vowed she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it from its twisted finger, hers, indisputably. She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful, she was commanding. Of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person living off the Brompton Road. She opened bedroom windows, she shut doors. So she tried to start the tune of Mrs. Ramsey in her head, Arriving late at night, with a little tap on one's bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat, for the setting of her beauty was always that, hasty but apt. She would enact again whatever it might be, Charles Tansley losing his umbrella, Mr. Carmichael snuffling and sniffing, Mr. Banks saying the vegetable salts are lost. All this she would adroitly shape, even maliciously twist, and, moving over to the window, in pretense that she must go, it was dawn she could see the sun rising. Half turned back, more intimately, still always laughing, insist that she must. Minta must, they all must marry. Since in the whole world, whatever laurels might be tossed to her, but Mrs. Ramsey cared not a fig for her painting. Or triumphs won by her. Probably Mrs. Ramsey had her share of those. And here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair. There could be no disputing this. An unmarried woman. She lightly took her hand for a moment. An unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping. And Mrs. Ramsey listening. Shaded lights and regular breathing. Oh, but Lily would say, there was her father, her home. Even had she dared to say it, her painting. But all this seems so little, so virginal against the other. Yet, as the night wore on and the white lights parted the curtains and even now and then some bird chirped in the garden, gathering a desperate courage, she would urge her own exemption from the universal law, plead for it. But she liked to be alone. She liked to be herself. She was not made for that. And so, have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth and confront Mrs. Ramsey's simple certainty. And she was childlike now. That her dear Lily, her little brisk, was a fool. Let's see if you can catch them all. She had laid her head on Mrs. Ramsey's lap, and laughed, and laughed, and laughed, laughed almost hysterically at the thought of Mrs. Ramsey presiding with immutable calm over destinies which she completely failed to understand. There she sat, simple, serious. This was the Glove's Twisted Finger. But into what sanctuary had one penetrated? Lily Briscoe had looked up last, and there was Mrs. Ramsey, unwitting entirely what had caused her laughter, still presiding, but now with every trace of willfulness abolished, and in its stead, something clear, as the space which the clouds at last uncover, the little space of sky which sleeps beside the moon. Was it wisdom? Was it knowledge? Was it, once more, the deceptiveness of beauty? So that all one's perceptions, halfway to truth, were tangled in a golden mesh? Or did she lock up within her some secret? Which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all. Everyone could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth, as she was. But if they knew, could they tell one what they knew? Sitting on the floor, with her arms round Mrs. Ramsey's knees, close as she could get, smiling to think that Mrs. Ramsey would never know the reason of that pressure. She imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was physically touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything, but they would never be offered openly, never made public. What art was there, known to love or cunning, by which one pressed through into those secret chambers? What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind subtly mingling, in the intricate passages of the brain, or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsey one? For it was not knowledge, but unity that she desired. Not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought. Leaning her head on Mrs. Ramsey's knee. Nothing happened. Nothing. As she leant her head against Mrs. Ramsey's knee. And yet, she knew knowledge and wisdom were stored up in Mrs. Ramsey's heart. She had asked herself, Did one know one thing or another about people, sealed as they were? Lonely like a bee drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air, intangible to touch or taste. One haunted, the dome shaped hive. The hearings, the hives, which were people. Mrs. Ramsey Rose, Lily Rose. Mrs. Ramsey, when? For days, they're hung about her, as after a dream some subtle change is felt in the person one is dreamt of. More vividly than anything she said, the sound of murmuring. As she sat in the wicker armchair, in the drawing room window. She wore, to Lily's eyes, an august. The shape.