Grandmother character
“I can’t describe things any more. I can’t find the words, or maybe it’s just that I’m not trying hard enough. It was such a long time ago. No one here was even born. And unless I tell it because I want to, it’s as if it never happened; it gets closed off and then it’s lost.”
A very long time ago, Grandmother had wanted to tell about all the things they did, but no one had bothered to ask. And now she had lost the urge.
***—The Summer Book
She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had been knocking about in her mind all these years.
Here was Lily, at forty-four, wasting her time, unable to do a thing, standing there, playing at painting, playing at the one thing one did not play at, and it was all Mrs. Ramsay’s fault. She was dead…
-Lily Briscoe, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
→ disconnection from emotion, drive. creative act which once used to be pure and dependable