To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is included on The 100 Best Books of All Time aka Bokklubben World Library list, also on The 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read, and finally, it is ranked 25th on The Greatest Books of All Time site, albeit not in my top 2,000 – hundreds of the works on these lists are reviewed on my blog, where the best thing is https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-this-unique-could-it-make-money.html 8 out of 10 as a subjective assessment, although this is almost universally cherished as one of the magnum opera of the world
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is included on The 100
Best Books of All Time aka Bokklubben World Library list, also on The 1,000
Novels Everyone Must Read, and finally, it is ranked 25th on The
Greatest Books of All Time site, albeit not in my top 2,000 – hundreds of the
works on these lists are reviewed on my blog, where the best thing is https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-this-unique-could-it-make-money.html
8 out of 10 as a subjective assessment, although this is
almost universally cherished as one of the magnum opera of the world
‘I feel as I do with Virginia Woolf I want to keep saying
'No, he didn't', No it didn't happen as you describe it', No, that isn't what
he thought…No, that's just what she didn't say’ this was Magister Ludi Kingsley
Amis complaining about the acclaimed author, who, in her turn, saw Joyce as nothing
but an irksome distraction from her reading of Marcel Proust…
Incidentally, perhaps the two greatest writers ever – Proust
is definitely number one for the under signed – met and even took a ride
together, after attending a beano, where they did not say much, and on their
short journey, James Joyce would open the window, which was something dangerous
for the ailing Marcel Proust
Virginia Woolf wrote that she was ‘puzzled, bored,
irritated, & disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his
pimples. And Tom, great Tom, thinks this on a par with War & Peace! An
illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working
man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw,
striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have
the raw?’
Furthermore, the author of To The Lighthouse insists ‘Never
did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but
the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy
at Claridges. Of course, genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts.
And this is what Eliot worships’
Ergo, I should not feel so bad about not seeing To The
Lighthouse as such a monumental chef d’oeuvre, or, at the very least, use that as
‘permission to be human’, a mantra suggested by Tal Ben Shahar https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/03/the-pursuit-of-perfect-by-tal-ben-shahar.html
we need to accept our flaws
Not in an egotistical, narcissistic way, like the most
ostentatious, abject example, the Orange Shit who has ejected the war hero
Zelensky from the White House and is always praising the dictator Putin, but in
trying to be kind to others and to one self – again, the displays of the new
orange emperor are the opposite of self-esteem
‘Mrs. Woolf - I hate her so much, she is guilty😔most
of the time of a forcing of Sensibility - what we get is a kind of intellectual
melodrama, 😤the exacerbation of totally fictitious
states of feeling into a Sentimental pipe- dream untouched by discipline and
disagreeable primness of the sentence structure, and the images themselves are
importunately tedious and unreal, exciting the response 'I don't believe a word
of it'
That was Kingsley Amis again, and I use another reference,
from To The Hermitage, which is quoted at the end of my standard ending, the characters
in good novels are deeper, more interesting, the plots offer gratifying resolutions
and more, while in To The Lighthouse, though I see the merits, I do not get
access
There is a sense that I do not have the right frequency, I
am clearly influenced, probably biased, after reading the very unfavorable
opinion of Kingsley Amis, my favorite author, and tend to see that the
protagonist has eight children, and somehow, that makes her less credible in my
eyes too, helped by King Amis, admittedly
I mean, people had eight children, still do in parts of the
world, but then they do not have the complexity, profile of Mrs. Ramsay, not in
my mind, which brings me to another point on the list used when reading a book
– which has to be God, just like Arthur Schopenhauer proclaimed, bad books
prevent one from reading good ones
Not that this is bad, or, well, it could me for yours truly,
and this comes down to According to Mark, by Penelope Lively https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/01/according-to-mark-by-penelope-lively.html
wherein we find that the author is God, he creates the characters, decides
what, when, how things happen to them, but at the same time, my addition to
this is that the reader is also some sort of monarch
He, she, they - this text would be banned in the US, seeing
as I used they, which means I trespass into DEI territory, regulated by the
likes of Trump and his bearded ‘piece of shit’, this is what they called him on
a Times podcast, after he has attacked a war hero, president of an invaded
country – by the way, diplomacy means you do not interject and scold somebody
higher, VP does not talk down to someone higher, not even on the same level,
but it is even more of a taboo to reach higher – have authority in their realm
If Mrs. Ramsey, her family and the rest of the population in
To The Lighthouse do not entertain me, then I take a leaf from the book of the
orange clown and throw them out – which is what they did with Zelensky, the
other day, I still do not believe it, and as evidenced here, it is very much on
my mind, granted, it is a paradigm
I just remembered about the boeuf in To The Lighthouse,
French cooking, how the English destroyed the meals, and it goes to show that,
instead of remembering lines about Shakespeare, I paid (too much) attention to
the less demanding, essential parts of this acclaimed work, which is far from a
favorite for the under signed
Now for my standard closing of the note with a question, and
invitation – maybe you have a good idea on how we could make more than a
million dollars with this https://realinibarzoi.blogspot.com/2025/02/is-this-unique-could-it-make-money.html – as it is, this is a unique technique, which
we could promote, sell, open the Oscars show with or something and then make
lots of money together, if you have the how, I have the product, I just do not
know how to get the befits from it, other than the exercise per se
There is also the
small matter of working for AT&T – this huge company asked me to be its
Representative for Romania and Bulgaria, on the Calling Card side, which meant
sailing into the Black Sea wo meet the US Navy ships, travelling to Sofia, a
lot of activity, using my mother’s two bedrooms flat as office and warehouse,
all for the grand total of $250, raised after a lot of persuasion to the
staggering $400…with retirement ahead, there are no benefits, nothing…it is a
longer story, but if you can help get the mastodont to pay some dues, or have
an idea how it can happen, let me know
As for my role in the Revolution that killed Ceausescu, a
smaller Mao, there it is http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/03/realini-in-newsweek-participant-in.html
Some favorite quotes from To The Hermitage and other works
‘Fiction is infinitely preferable to real life...As long as
you avoid the books of Kafka or Beckett, the everlasting plot of fiction has
fewer futile experiences than the careless plot of reality...Fiction's people
are fuller, deeper, cleverer, more moving than those in real life…Its actions
are more intricate, illuminating, noble, profound…There are many more dramas,
climaxes, romantic fulfillment, twists, turns, gratified resolutions…Unlike
reality, all of this you can experience without leaving the house or even
getting out of bed…What's more, books are a form of intelligent human
greatness, as stories are a higher order of sense…As random life is to destiny,
so stories are to great authors, who provided us with some of the highest
pleasures and the most wonderful mystifications we can find…Few stories are
greater than Anna Karenina, that wise epic by an often foolish author…’
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