“How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light and their reflections.” (Virginia Woolf, “The Mark on the Wall”)
The sea spread out for miles…and the sand. Her eyes searched these limits and there was only sea rolling in, rolling in…and sand, cool and wet from the slap of the surf. She gazed at this world and was alone. She heard the wind and the waves, the gulls crying overhead—that screeching cry as if from hunger.
One gull floated above in a gliding gauze. Suddenly, with its head cocked downward to the sea, its eyes piercing as though it could see into the depths of the wetness to the sandy floor below, in a twirling motion with the grace of a ballerina, or, like an arrow shrieking to its mark so quick was it, it came down charging into the water. Then, just as suddenly, it popped back to the surface and flew into the air, its catch in its beak. Then it soared again. The waves slapped the sand and she felt the cold salt water wash up upon her legs. There were small shells beneath her feet that were disturbed in their motionlessness by the movement of her toes digging into the sand for support against the slap of water.
The wind that blew through the trees, the wind that the gulls soared through, blew into her face—the same wind. The same sea that supported the fish hit her legs as it moved its everlasting movement. The same sand that held the shells and all the minute particles of life beneath in the dark recesses supported her feet. She could look at it all—feel it, hear it, smell it—but she was not a part of it. She was alone within her body and mind.
She could see all of this life around her but she could not see herself. She could picture in her mind a woman alone on a long stretch of beach gazing to the end of the world; a woman standing very still but for the force of water swaying her… looking, listening, feeling, her arms hung limply at her side. Was this woman in her imagination the reality? Soon she wouldn’t have even the image. She was alone and her separateness overwhelmed her.
Suddenly the gull twirled in his diving spiral down into the depths of water. Moments passed…the sea kept moving, the wind kept groaning and the sun kept falling into the end of the world. Moments passed…and the gull did not emerge.
She breathed deeply and sighed. Her breath made an invisible ring of air outward and outward. She was the center. She gazed at the spot where the gull had disappeared. The water was swirling in a whirlpool, sending ring after ring outward, away from the center. Her vision pierced through that center—at the still point of the turning world—and she saw into the depths of that wetness, into its mystery. Moments passed…an eternity perhaps. Then she walked into the sea.
Note: In his biography of Virginia Woolf, her nephew, Quentin Bell, wrote that on March 28, 1941, “at about 11:30 [she] slipped out, taking her walking-stick with her and making her way across the water-meadows to the river….Leaving her stick on the bank she forced a large stone into the pocket of her coat. Then she went to her death, ‘the one experience,’ as she had said to Vita [Sackville-West], ‘I shall never describe.” She left a note for her sister, Vanessa Bell, and another for her husband, Leonard Woolf. In that second letter she explained that she felt she was going mad again and that she would not recover this time. “What I want to say is, I owe all the happiness of my life to you….I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” To the world she left her novels and short stories.
