A Room of One's Own

It is Sunday, a rare idle day, and in a room of my own I have finished Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Her prose is fine-grained and beautiful. The first part follows her thinking through the state of mind in which a writer works, and from there through the many obstructions placed before women who wrote before the eighteenth century; the last part is her reflection on the mind and on making things.

The text grew out of two lectures she gave at the women's colleges of Cambridge. Is it a stream-of-consciousness novel? Perhaps closer to an essay of thought, or a poem. Does it matter? It does not. What matters is the truth of the thing — what this text is, what Woolf meant by it. The prior sorting into "stream of consciousness or not," "novel or not," is not only unimportant; dwelling on it puts a filter over the eye and bends the truth the text is trying to carry.

By the same token — and Woolf says this too, and it has long been my own view — a writer expressing, a mind working through thought, should stay as close to the truth as it can, without prejudice of any kind, including the prejudice of being a man or the prejudice of being a woman.

It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. One must be woman-manly or man-womanly; anyone purely and simply a man, or purely and simply a woman, is lost.

"Five hundred a year and a room of one's own" stand for the capacity to think carefully and independently, and for leisure and freedom. Woolf was writing not for women only but for the great majority of people in the world. Womanhood is a situation. What kept women from writing before the eighteenth century was women's poverty and the prejudice against women — that situation. Much has improved: equal pay for equal work, and the prejudice against women's writing has weakened a great deal. Nowadays, if a young man says he wants to be a writer, wants to write poems, people find him oddly sentimental.

What Woolf asks — to have money, freedom, leisure, and through them the capacity to touch what is real in the world — is a demand and a call addressed to every one of us, regardless of sex. (To bring sex into everything, to think through one prejudice after another, would itself be the disrespect, the desecration of Woolf.) I have, at present, enough money to keep myself alive, but I do not have freedom or leisure: on working days I work from the moment I open my eyes until I sleep, and only on Sunday is there time to read a little and write down a few thoughts. I also plan every day in a calendar. The advantage is that fragmented time nearly disappears and efficiency rises; the disadvantage is just as plain — over-dividing and over-planning one's time smothers, to a large degree, creativity and imagination.

"A great mind is androgynous." — Coleridge

The closing argument of A Room of One's Own, on the fusion and concord of the two sexes within a single mind, surprised and delighted me. I had not expected her final thought to be so unbound — rather than an argument confined to the situation of one sex. You can see it in the title and the diction: Woolf always writes one, never he or she. The other reason for my delight is that I had lately been thinking about the androgynous mind, the mind beyond sex, and had come to the same conclusion: that only such a personality is whole, and closer to the truth of life.

As for myself: my sex is male, but I think the feminine element in my mind outweighs the masculine. I feel my temperament balances the two well enough, which is why I am calm, and why I can feel the richness and depth of the world better than any woman in whom the feminine dominates or any man in whom the masculine does. Womanhood is a situation; so is manhood. I have no interest in arguing which situation is superior — that is people fighting for their own interests and prejudices. As a person I am of course for equality; but what equality is, and what counts as equal, is a deep philosophical question that I have not thought through with enough insight to discuss, so I refrain from judging it through a prejudice of my own.

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence (I think she means the childish stage, though the translation does not quite reach it), where there are "sides," and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot. As people mature they cease to believe in sides or in Headmasters or in highly ornamental pots.

Sides and labels do not matter. What matters is the wholeness of a person as a person, and the capacity to apprehend the truth of the world. The first asks you to set down as much prejudice as you can and to let out, as far as you can, a set of values they have not warped — the authenticity of your own life. Any writing carrying too much prejudice is maimed and destined to wither. Go and take in the truth of the world, go through every kind of feeling, look at different people and different landscapes, and write what you want to write. Of course, this needs money, the capacity for reflection, and leisure.

Reading literature and writing are luxuries. Since starting university I have been too busy; I rarely read or wrote. I loved literature in high school, and I am slowly picking it back up. That is a piece of luck; even the idleness of it is a luxury. Now, beyond time and money, there is attention: too much information, clutter and noise, and these too disturb the mind. May everyone keep safe that room of their own.