The Window

¿Cómo es James? ¿Qué piensa de su padre y de su madre? Así escribe Virginia Woolf los primeros párrafos de To the Lighthouse…

"Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow," said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up early in the morning," she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, provided the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was decorated with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling--all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of absolute and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and dignified on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

"But," said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, "it won't be fine." Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never changed with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure…

Tapa del libro

Vocabulario reemplazado

with the lark

endowed

fringed

stark

ermine

tampered

Vocabulario

poplar: álamo

rook: cuervo

broom: escoba

El libro

To the Lighthouse es una novela de Virginia Woolf de 1927. La novela se centra en la familia Ramsay en Escocia entre los años 1910 y 1920. To the Lighthouse es un ejemplo de novela en la que se usa la técnica literaria stream of consciousness (corriente de la consciencia). Al igual que otros escritores modernistas como Marcel Proust y James Joyce, Virginia Woolf usa el argumento como algo secundario, siendo más importante su introspección filosófica. La novela incluye pequeños diálogos y casi no tiene acción. La mayor parte son pensamientos y observaciones. Llama a emociones de la niñez y subraya relaciones adultas.
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