As I sit re-reading Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s
Diary on this particularly balmy end-summer afternoon, I feel a sense of unmistakable
peace stealing over me. I sit on my patio admiring the queer shaped
cloud-monsters staring at me blatantly and observing the pattern of the
sap-green hibiscus leaves. It’s beautifully quiet save for the occasional
chirrup of birds, the guttural noise squirrels make, the flapping of pigeon
wings and the intermittent thudding sound wafted from the carpenters’ workshop
next door. Having spent the whole day reading and writing away from the hinterland
of social media and cellular phone, I feel a lambent radiance slowly
illuminating the hitherto dark corners of my mind riddled with the soot of
future worries. Indeed, I am now convinced that when you need answers it’s best
to look inside. I don’t know how many of you are in love with solitude and occasional
asocial life, but I know I am. I derived the greatest pleasure today when I
directed my attention toward my avocation. Writing solves problems, I am sure
it does. I know sometimes it is hard to string together the thoughts; sometimes the mind
is so eerily quiet that you begin to doubt. Nevertheless, you must persevere;
at least that is what Virginia Woolf did. She labored from one story to another
turning a conscious eye toward her art and striving her best to perfect it
through experimentation and constant reading. I have always found Woolf a
darling writer. I love her, and so, I love her fiction. Her often snobbish,
often prudish nerd-like philosophical stance is deliciously palatable to my
taste-buds. I remember getting back to this diary of hers when I was stuck with
a short story a few years ago. The reading did nothing to alleviate the
stifling situation, but it sure made me more confident of myself. Woolf is my
panacea; and this afternoon I feel I love her more than ever. The cloud-monsters
keep changing position in the sky sometimes growing grim with sudden
desperation and sometime allowing the sun to permeate through them with the vim
and vigor of a teenager. I see them and wonder if Woolf too had stared like me
at some cumulous populated once-azure sky and indulged in wordplay. I can
imagine her frail form at her desk close in her study looking out with an
admiring eye at the ever-changing visage of a day. Somehow the colors seem very
bright to me today. The digladiation between contradictory thoughts is conspicuous
by its absence. All is calm, all is quiet. I know sometimes I let myself go on and
generally give in to lugubriousness or loquaciousness without reticence, but
the process of penning rambling thoughts clarifies several of my life’s puzzles
for me. At the touch of self-created philosophy and under the aegis of
contemplation, my thoughts sort themselves out. I think it’s going to rain this
evening; I will wait for it.
