I had a jonah week of it this last - too many readings that made me feel angry, attacked, policed, chastised for my politics and for the way I want my politics to interact with my scholarship. (One of my classes is stuck on surface vs. symptomatic reading, and neither camp seems to speak for me, or in any way that I find useful. it's been very irritating.)
But - blessedly! - I get to read Virginia Woolf for next week. It's been so soothing, so comforting. Reading her makes me cry - I weep with her, but I also weep because it feels so good to have her state, with her own inimitable grace, the truths that I hold most dear. She gives me solid ground to stand on, and as grad school thus far has been an exercise in painful attempted destabilization, I felt pathetically grateful to come back to her.
Three Guineas has new resonance for me this time around, now that I've moved up a layer in the academic establishment. And this long passage in particular made me weep and sigh and cheer, rather embarrassingly as I was reading in the grad student work room:
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'But it is also plain that outsiders who find you thus occupied must ask themselves, when they receive a request for a contribution towards rebuilding your college, Shall I send it or shan’t I? If I send it, what shall I ask them to do with it? Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant & May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?
‘These are the questions, Madam, that have kept your letter so long unanswered. They are questions of great difficulty and perhaps they are useless questions. But can we leave them unasked in view of this gentleman’s questions? He is asking how can we help him to prevent war? He is asking us how we can help him to defend liberty; to defend culture? Also consider these photographs: they are pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses. Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people that will help to prevent war.
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