Lily Briscoe and stillness

The final paragraph of Virginia Woolf's novel 'To The Lighthouse'

I recently wrote an essay for my module ‘The Modern Period’ on Lily Briscoe’s journey as an artist throughout To The Lighthouse. Transcending from her previous struggles and warring approaches to her art form, Lily’s stabilised and meditative outlook on painting allows for the successful completion of her artwork after ten years. Perhaps the biggest indicator of Lily’s success, Woolf’s narrative shifts from a bustling chaos of questioning and the mechanics behind painting, such as in the scene of the dinner party, to that of peace and almost, nothingness as the novel ends. We don’t even get to see Lily’s painting. We just have to accept the novel’s ending as Woolf writes to stillness.

This made me think about a 21st century paradox. I’m going to try my best to phrase this as simply as possible. There’s a rabbit hole that eats a small part of my brain away every time I think about it. I feel like I am only living when I am online: when I post my daily activities, or this very act of writing down my thoughts for an audience, or when I’m scrolling through social media to catch up with everything that’s happened since I fell asleep eight or so hours ago. And I feel like I am pausing my life and living some sort of whimsical hold on reality when I choose to go off the grid. TLDR: Online living/Offline escape from life. This sounds like a bit of a stretch. What about Virginia Woolf taps into my inherent fear of being chronically online in the name of living?

‘Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps, they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.’

The novel’s final paragraph creates an almost silencing effect to Woolf’s signature stream of consciousness style of writing. It starts with a fast-paced narrative rhythm which initially leads to a crescendo as Lily is seen ‘taking up her brush again’. The paragraph references the painting’s previous ‘greens’ and ‘blues’, colours that are associated with nature and in particular, the water that surrounds the lighthouse, which literary theorist Jack F. Stewart links to ‘imaginative and spiritual reality’. The disorderly imagery of ‘lines running up and across’ creates a contrasting chaotic effect to the ‘greens and blues’ in Lily’s ‘attempt at something’. Although the colours symbolically represent Lily’s ‘imaginative’ and ‘spiritual’ progress, the finishing touches of the ‘lines’ fail to align. The diction ‘something’ degrades the artistic value of the painting as Lily thinks of it as unworthy and without purpose.

The narrative focus then moves on from the painting to Lily’s rhetorical question ‘But what did that matter?’ as she begins to imagine it ‘hung in the attics’ as a failure of an ‘attempt’. The short rhetorical question silences the long sentences that come before it as Lily looks at her canvas in a different light. The semi colons that structurally fragment the sentence ‘She looked at the steps, they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred.’ allows for a refinement of her artistic approach as the narrative of the lens shifts from Lily to the steps, and to her canvas- in an almost cinematic manner. The transition from ‘blurred’ to ‘clear’ symbolically represents the state of her mind as with one ‘line there, in the centre’, her ten year journey is over. Like a boat at foggy sea guided by the illumination of a lighthouse, Lily successfully finishes her craft with a mental illumination. The anaphora ‘It was done; it was finished.’ puts painting in the past tense, behind her, as she repeats the notion of ‘done’ and ‘finished’- cementing her ‘vision’. The final words by Lily in the novel, ‘I have had my vision.’ simultaneously refer to her role as an artist and life’s observant. With a clear absence of a description of her painting, the readers are left with a sense of nothingness after the novel’s turmoil in struggling to convey the power of art in representing reality and the world in front of Lily.  This sense of nothingness, however, strikingly draws full circle in Lily’s stream of consciousness as she links the final stroke of her painting to the silencing of the almost cacophonic noise that had plagued her brain for the past ten years.

To put in simple language, Woolf seems to be linking the feeling of being content with stillness. Lily doesn’t feel the need to narratively describe the final composition of her painting or the future for her art. She just finishes it. I don’t think it’s wrong to assume that some readers feel disappointment to this rather anti-climactic final paragraph, considering how famous this novel is. The narrative goes from acting as a camera, painting a myriad of portraits of everyone and everything, to utter stillness.

To go back into the rabbit hole, I struggle quite a bit with my online presence. I’m not a shy or inherently private person so I’m not really worried about security or privacy (although I probably should be). I’m anxious about presenting myself as chronically online. You know sometimes, I catch myself thinking Why do they have to post a story every single they hang out? or They have a close friends list for a reason. And I have to do a double-take before I post anything on my main Instagram account to appear as nonchalant as possible. It sounds stupid but I think I’ve trained myself to think that the happiest people are always offline. I’ve deleted my account multiple times throughout my life, removed hundreds of followers, archived countless posts…but does any of this even matter? Will I be on my deathbed thinking about how I posted that one story of a picture with text? It’s not even about perception anymore. I just feel shame in sharing my life online because I feel like it is a sign of weakness. I often catch myself saying: the more I post, the less happy I am. But I’m not sure. Is this stillness that Woolf captures a result of keeping things to yourself or the peace you find within yourself as you stop justifying your every decision. I like things, I share things, and then I feel like a total idiot for presenting myself in a certain way. Like for example, will I ever go on holiday without posting tens of photos about it? But then again, what is so wrong about creating a dumb highlight about my travels? It’s literally just a photographic record for me to pin.

I’m not quite sure where I am going with this. But I think it’s something I feel more strongly about as I become older. I will be perceived by strangers whatever I do. But it’s more about how I feel about the things that bring me joy in life. I think my brain tricks itself into thinking my leisure is performative like Am I really in the presence of my friends if I post them on my story? or Did I watch this film to write a review for people to like? It sounds stupid but I think my online presence has blurred the line between joy and guilt. Do I really like this thing if I feel guilty about doing it? Where is this guilt coming from?

This brings me to one of resolutions for the new year. I want to start trying to find the balance between stillness and life. I have never actually tapped into the concept of inner peace. I kind of just live the hard days and recover by doing absolutely nothing. And then I feel guilty for doing nothing so I strive for the harder days to come faster to wash away any semblance of guilt. I guess I just want to live the kind of life where I can feel stillness without having to justify it.