I'm about halfway through Mrs. Dalloway and am once again reminded by how brilliant and difficult Virginia Woolf is. She has crazy sentences that run on for miles. Points of view change almost imperceptibly from paragraph to paragraph. The story reads like a conscious dream... which makes no sense whatsoever, but that's what I'm typing and I'm sticking to it.
She has a way of writing that at first seems like she's isn't talking about shit, but at the same time I feel like she has focused in on life with a clarity that almost scares me. What scares me is the reverence she holds for the ordinariness of life.
There is a danger in defining our lives by remarkable moments, because then we have a false view of what life is. Life is all the time in between those extraordinary moments. It's the mundane details like choosing what to wear in the morning and picking up the mail. It's waiting for the elevator and driving to work. This is what makes up a majority of our life, they are our experiences and they ultimately shape who we are. What happens in these dull moments is what determines our behavior during extrarodinary times.
I sit here. I drink my tea. I stare out the window. Makes a pretty boring picture doesn't it? But what is invisible, what is important, is what goes through my head. I think about my past; random memories jumble through my head. I think about the future; plans are formulated and abandoned. I think about people; feelings ebb and flow. If I could describe all of this in words, you would know me wholly and completely. Because it turns out that what you can't see is who I am.