Virginia Woolf at Seventeen: The Warboys Journal Two

Virginia Woolf at Seventeen: The Warboys Journal Two

In a St. Ives secondhand bookstore I purchased LOGIC: OR, THE Right Use of REASON WITH A Variety of Rules To Guard Against ERROR in the AFFAIRS of RELIGION and HUMAN LIFE as well as in the Sciences, by the Late Reverend & Learned Isaac Watts, DD. I care nothing for its LOGIC but bought it for its binding & now am pasting over every REASON & RULE my own journal pages. Resplendent, tooled calf imparts such dignity.

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My pen is rather unwell at present. I practice my penmanship to rouse it.

Long ago there was some question which I do not now remember . . .

Long ago there . . .

This curiously sensual love of all that is . . .

Long . . .

Long went the days . . .

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write wright right rite

rein reign rain

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The woods decay, the woods decay &

fall; the vapours weep their burden to the ground

Man only comes & tills the earth & lies beneath

& after many a summer dies the swan.

This I . . .

This I write in the year of a . . .

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Over his words I am now pasting six carts, one long, white road, blue spaces within a cloud-crowded sky, a bit of joy, & a single day in time. How long will it be, I wonder, until the fabric that divides us crumbles & my sentences end what his began?

The nature of things . . . crawled toward me

The Right Use of Reason . . . stretched away from me

Logic . . . was softened by reeds and a haze of white moths

A variety of Rules . . . passed me in absolute silence