One of my favorite books is Virginia Woolf’s modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway.  If you’ve never read a modernist novel, you are better off than those who were taught one poorly.  Reading Woolf is no joke, and if you pick up one of her works unprepared for what you might encounter, you likely won’t make it past the first few pages. I know I wouldn’t have.

Woolf famously experimented with stream of consciousness – a literary technique that allowed her to explore the thoughts and feelings of multiple characters while writing in the third person.  She also did this in what I would describe as “real time.”  A character might step off a curb (as Mrs. Dalloway does in the opening pages of the novel bearing her name) and by the time she’s crossed the street and stepped up on the opposite side – Woolf has spent pages explicating her every thought – vaulting back in time to her summer spent in a resort town as a young woman, then rocketing instantly back to her perceptions of the present day, and then – in the same sentence – jumping out of Mrs. Dalloway’s head altogether into a neighbor on the street who notices how the title character has aged since her recent illness.  I teach Mrs. Dalloway every year, and I explain to my students that what Woolf created was art – she captured the essence of the human experience; the disorientation of a single human’s daily thoughts, often unanchored to place or time, crystallized on the page.  It’s beautiful and confusing, and unsettling, and frustrating, and ridiculously satisfying to read Woolf.  As she likely intended, it’s quite a bit like living a life.

In “Modern Fiction,” an essay published in The Common Reader, Woolf said of life that it is “not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; [it] is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”  Her literature was her attempt to render that “luminous halo” – to capture that quality of life we all experience but rarely recognize.  How could we possibly? We are Clarissa Dalloway – roaming London, buying flowers, caught up in our musings about the party we’re hosting that night, the former lover we can’t let go of, the daughter we’ve failed to understand, the neighbor we hope shows up to our soiree, the strange couple who briefly catches our attention in the park, and – occasionally, fleetingly – lest it ruin an otherwise beautiful day – the crushing weight of our own inescapable mortality.  How can we shake ourselves from the fetters of our own daily existence to see it for what it is? Well, if you happen to be in my AP Lit class, I’ll make a damn good argument that we do it by reading art created by writers like Woolf.

Woolf goes even further in her experimental form by often focusing on a single object in the life of a city (i.e. a backfiring car, or Big Ben).  She then appropriates that object as a launch pad to sweep rapidly through the experiences, thoughts, and interpretations of multiple human beings in the perceptual range of said object. In one of my favorite scenes, a small plane spirals through the sky above London – the trail of smoke behind it spelling out what is apparently an advertisement. Everyone looks up.  Woolf then bounces from person to person – spelling out their perceptions of the letters that “only for a moment…lie still; then they moved and melted, and were rubbed out up in the sky.” One woman thinks they spell out “Glaxo,” another across town reads “Kreemo,” and a third individual, a man, is sure the disappearing letters said “toffee.”

The reader never learns what was written in the sky on the day of Mrs. Dalloway’s spectacular party, and it doesn’t matter.  Why I love the scene, and why it resonates with me, and so many readers, is that it exposes the fundamental truth that we as human beings are both united and divided by common experience. We perceive the exact same moment in wildly different ways.  At any given second in time, thousands, or even millions of people are watching the same television show, hearing the same song on the radio, or listening to the same storm boom and roll over their homes, but we are seeing, hearing, and perceiving the same moment in totally, completely, and radically different ways.

Why am I quoting Woolf and, dear Lord, why am subjecting my readership to such mental gymnastics on a Monday? (Unless of course you read this tonight, but why would you? I shouldn’t even be writing it. I should be sleeping).

Well, today I went to watch the Chicago air and water show.  As I walked along Illinois on my way to meet my friend Brit, an F-22 Raptor swept overhead and everyone looked up. Men, women, and children stood rooted to the ground, necks craned skyward as the concussive blast of the massive stealth bomber’s flight reverberated through our bodies. My grin stretched from ear to ear.  I couldn’t help but think of Woolf, and Mrs. Dalloway, and even if I was the only person in Chicago thinking about that 1920’s modernist novel – I know the people around me felt what I did.  They felt connected – to this city, to each other, and to that exact moment in time when we all turned our faces toward the sky. In those few seconds, we were all totally and completely separate, but totally and completely connected at the same time, and that is a beautiful thing.  It’s the beautiful thing that reading and writing and thinking and teaching allow me to catch and hold – if only briefly.  I talked to a few strangers today, but not a single conversation could compare to that moment when we all looked up.

Until next time…

P.S. While it’s not a picture of the F-22, here’s a shot I took of the Blue Angels as they flew over Navy Pier.