"Slice of life. A little bit self congratulating — like a hyper realistic portrait. Yes you’ve captured it well, but beyond that, what? Maybe that’s the point — the smallness of it — all of modern life finite enough, petty enough to fit into the slice. Why have another slice when you know the next slice will be pretty much the same as the slice you’ve just had? Depressive: “more than this, there’s nothing” the song goes. And yet Septimus’ wife didn’t even get to eat her whole slice — she could only have one bite or two before her plate was taken away. “More than this, there’s nothing,” which is why you’ve got to have all of it, or as much of it as you can. If I went on like this for another 190 pages — that would be Mrs. Dalloway! An aside on suicide: it’s a tragic irony when you are able dismiss everything as trivial, except your torment, which you insist is deadly serious. If you’re going to insist that something is serious — why not be like Lady Bruton and insist on emigration to Canada being that something! Which I acknowledge is a very cold, dispassionate Sir William Bradshaw sort of take. But Clarissa’s take is not functionally different, though its ostensibly more sensitive: for her, that something is the sublime beauty of a dusky sky. And yet for Woolf, even that could only hold her over until age 59. Perhaps Woolf died because she loved life too much, not too little — and could not bear to see its final inches slip silk-like through her fingers. It’s like abandoning a book 10 pages before you finish it, because you can’t bear for it to end and abandon you. A phenomenological 5 stars, for snapping me out of my (vital but worldly) immersion in my crush, my work, my life, and make me contemplate my existence for a moment"

Marg wants to read A Room with a View