Reading: To the Lighthouse

I've discovered that reading Virginia Woolf puts me in kind of an irritable mood. So far I've only read Flush, A Room of One's Own and now To the Lighthouse, but they all feature cultural bondage in one form or another, particularly the bondage of love. After awhile I begin to feel as though the mere presence of other beings in the world imposes an unbearable pressure on me, and it gets worse and worse as I go along until eventually I have to take the cat off my lap and put him in another room.

I'm not sure what Woolf felt so damn bound about, in the matter of love at least, since her husband was by all accounts supportive to the point of self-effacement. Maybe it was just that she was nuts -- the mental illness that led to her suicide was manic-depression, I believe. Personally, if I'd been asked, I would have chosen a wildly successful marriage and taken my chances on mediocrity in everything else (which is fortunate because that's pretty much how it's worked out for me so far).

I was about to continue "so it makes even less sense that I'd be affected that way," but on thinking about it I realize that I'm exactly wrong about that. If you love happily, your actions are influenced by the people you love down to the very last nuance, whether they set out to influence you or not -- even more so, I believe, than if you're unhappy. I can see why someone like Virginia Woolf would feel bound by that.