Virginia Woolf's Life Lesson #1: Speak Up

I've been reading Liz Gilbert's novel, The Signature of All Things--and like it so far.  But sometimes I have to take a break from a such long narratives, especially one with a lot of Latin botanical terms that make my eyes glaze over.

I haven't actually read the novels of Virginia Woolf since graduate school, but I remember liking them and writing a paper on  To The Lighthouse.  Today I was looking through my bookshelves for Barbara Kingsolver's book of essays and stumbled upon a book about Virginia Woolf that I must have bought months ago and forgot to read.

The author, Ilana Simons, had just completed her PhD in literature and was in training to be a clinical psychologist when she wrote this book, A Life Of One's Own, subtitled "A Guide to Better Living through the work and wisdom of Virginia Woolf."

Woolf had bipolar disorder and died in 1941.  Obviously, Woolf felt deeply, and her books are, according to the author, all about the interior lives of her characters.  In spite of the final act of her own life (suicide), there is much wisdom in her writing about the "map"of the human mind.

Just three weeks before her death, she wrote in her diary, "Observe perpetually. Observe the oncoming of age. Observe greed.  Observe my own despondency."

Each chapter in the book is a lesson--gleaned from Woolf's novels and related to modern life by the author--about how to live a fuller life.  Ironically, Woolf herself--by ending her life--may not have been able to find the balance or survive the pain of her depression.  

Woolf's novels often include dinner table scenes, and the lesson for chapter one is, "Speak up."

We can sit at the table (as some of Woolf's characters do) judging everyone else there, but not speaking a word.  As long as we remain silent, we can maintain the illusion that what we think is better, brighter, and funnier than what everyone else is saying.  We may--especially when we are young--criticize everyone else without putting our two cents in.

The author says, "Woolf's heroines in her novels are the hostesses who are big enough to like ordinary people, which means they even welcome friends with sloppy habits....She has a dinner party because she knows this is who we are, and she loves the diversity of it."

Maturity means accepting differences and not sitting quietly judging everyone else: "Your ideas don't need to be perfectly formed before you speak them....You get human by admitting you're more than one self."

To speak up at a dinner party is to risk appearing foolish, uninformed, stupid, arrogant, or whatever--but in taking that risk, we become part of the conversation that reveals more of who we (and the others at the table) really are.