hir·aeth

It is not always easy to believe that the same individual might, as Byron put it, have under the same skin “two or three within.” Those apparently exuberant are less often recognized as having a darker side, and those cast as doomed or depressive may never be seen for the liveliness they actually possess. Virginia Woolf is remembered more for her madness and suicide than for her vitality, despite the testament of her friends to her animation and dazzling laughter. Christopher Isherwood recalled that “listening to [Woolf] we missed appointments, forgot love-affairs, stayed on and on into the small hours,” and Nigel Nicolson spoke of her vivacity: “One would hand her a bit of information as dull as a lump of lead,” he said. “She would hand it back glittering like diamonds. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of excellent champagne. She was a life-enhancer.” Elizabeth Bowen, while recognizing Woolf’s ultimate fate, put her suicidal depression in the context of the rest of her life: “I was aware, one could not but be aware, of an undertow often of sadness, of melancholy, of great fear. But the main impression was of a creature of laughter and movement. In the Diary she says, “I enjoy everything I do.” Do you remember?—it was a good day. And her power in conveying enjoyment was extraordinary. And her laughter was entrancing, it was outrageous laughter, almost like a child’s laughter. Whoops of laughter, if anything amused her. As it happened, the last day I saw her I was staying at Rodmell and I remember her kneeling back on the floor—we were tacking away, mending a torn Spanish curtain in the house—and she sat back on her heels and put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun. Then she laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful, hooting way. And that is what has remained with me. So I get a curious shock when I see people regarding her entirely as a martyred…or definitely tragic sort of person, claimed by the darkness. She ended, as far as we know, in darkness, but—where is she now? Nobody with that capacity for joy, I think, can be nowhere. And it was joy.” Yet it remains difficult to keep in mind the duality of moods. The prevailing mood tends to dominate the emotional landscape, both for the person and for those in its sphere of influence (277-278).

“I just wanted you to know there will be a piece of you in me. Always.”

requested by anon

requested by @haljathefangirlcat