All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West

I was a little nervous about rereading this book, because I remember it as one of the best books I've ever read, and was afraid that I would be disappointed. I needn't have worried, this is one of the most beautiful, touching and sad books in the world, wonderfully written and compelling throughout. I couldn't put it down and read it in an absolute haze of delight. It reminds me (obviously) of Virginia Woolf, but much less dense and challenging to read. It lacks Woolf's meandering syntax and doesn't have the same degree of richness (who does?), but this makes it much easier to read and understand, so that I didn't feel exhausted and overwhelmed after ten pages, as I often do with Woolf. It's also quaintly funny and the characters are very well-executed. This book is also the reason that Hampstead is my favourite area of London, I think of it every time I go there. I was wandering around there last weekend, and knew that I absolutely had to reread this novel. On reading, this particular passage caught my attention; 'And there were many selves. She could never be the same self with him as when she was alone; and even that solitary self which she pursued, shifted, changed,
melted away as she approached it, she could never drive it into a dark corner, and there, like a robber in the night, hold it by the throat against the wall, the hard core of self chased into a blind alley of refuge.' Which is very similar to this passage from To the Lighthouse: 'And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless.' (Which is incidentally probably my favourite passage in literature). It's curious that they have that same image of a wedge, a hard core, but Woolf portrays a moment of peace, an intensely un-physical moment of bodily absence, while Sackville-West uses an image of very physical violence ('drive it into a dark corner... hold it by the throat against the wall') in dealing with a central self. I don't know what it means, but I thought it was a fascinating contrast.