breathedout | Such the conditions of our love (Reply)

It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us—why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.

Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.

—Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

I feel sure I’ve tumbled this passage before, but now I can’t find it. One of my absolute, all-time favorite collections of words. The last two to three sentences are among my top contenders for the tattoo I will probably never get.

And these ideas are also relevant to the plotting stuff I was doing last night on the next Unreal Cities story [NB this would've been A hundred hours, and I was not wrong]. Basically it doesn’t get any better than this, as far as I’m concerned.