To the Lighthouse
I first read To the Lighthouse fifteen years ago. I was a senior in high school. I had a list of books to choose from in an AP course, I believe, and felicitously took this one up. It instantly became one of my lifetime favorite books. What I remember most from that reading is the way Virginia Woolf set down in words something that previously had been nebulous for me--something sensed but impossible to articulate. We are all like icebergs, I realized from this book, the rocky tip of which is visible above the surface of the sea as we come together in life and connect and converse; but so much lies beneath, and we can only see a few murky meters of our neighbors before everything blends into the dark below the water line, invisible and unknown. It was Lily Briscoe at dinner that did it; we witness and are carried along in her gush of fellow feeling as she listens to Paul's plan to go search the beach tomorrow for the brooch that Minta has lost, and her complex feeling erupts in a
