From the Archives: Part 121 of The Self and its Sources

The end of the novel.

While Virginia Woolf was writing “The Waves”, TS Eliot was writing “Ash Wednesday”.

From the Archives: Part 120 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard: a man without a self. The little light of dawn, seen as the Nietzsche's "eternal return", elicits a new desire to be tantalized and thwarted. The romanticism of death and nihilism

From the Archives: Part 119 of The Self and its Sources

Charles Taylor’s study of the modern self: the modern self insists on a position of subjectivity exclusively, to the extent that one can only refer to one’s self in the third person.

From the Archives: Part 118 of The Self and it Sources

Bernard stands at the back of St. Paul’s cathedral ready to verify and inform curiosity. Unable to rise on the shaft of someone else’s prayer he returns to the bustling street, swinging his stick, flowing with the stream of consciousness.

From the Archives: Part 117 of The Self and its Sources

Bernard at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He has come to the right spot for Virginal Woolf to end the novel. Can she do it? Bernard’s knee-jerk antipathy for received truth. Compare to Kierkegaard’s ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’.

From the Archives: Part 116 of The Self and its Sources

Studied nonchalance – the appearance of disinterest – pretending that one is not pretending. Hiding our lack of self-sufficiency

From the Archives: Part 115 of The Self and its Sources

Virginia Woolf’s attempt to conclude the novel: Bernard seizes his chance. At rush hour he dashes to the barber. It is shriving time. The melodrama is played out in mirrors.

From the Archives: Part 114 of The Self and its Sources

The difficulty of concluding the novel.

From the Archives: Part 113 of The Self and its Sources

Great novels always spring from an obsession that has been transcended.

– René Girard