vw + vs-w = <3

i finished this thick collection off in a day, unable to interrupt my eavesdropping on virginia and vita, no matter how i tried. i sensed that this was dangerous territory, that in watching dual performances of idealized selves fall in love and flirt and fuck and fight, i would surely find myself heartsore and longing. it is true. i think of vita, her small lips, her giant eyes, her young, exuberant devotion and admiration and i have the chest pains of a living crush. i think of quiet virginia, the slender crag, with her pride and brilliance and wish to be her reincarnation -- madness, illness, ennui and all -- if it meant i could one day hope to match her prose. how did virginia love vita so hard and still love leonard so well and perhaps even harder? how did she write these letters and still have the emotional time for novels and essays and equally-voluminous (if not equally-passionate) correspondences with other lovers, with friends and family? i am overwhelmed. even on blank days, i am lucky to wring three pages from the dry stone that is my brain. and of course, she was the virginia woolf and i am just me, but really, need the disparity be so insurmountable!? my main complaint with this collection is that virginia is too edited. in another collection of her letters (which i lost this weekend) one gets a better sense of her rhythms to vita, while in this collection we are lucky to two consecutive paragraph's from virginia without the maddening and enticing secrecy of the ". . . " in this particular collection, it is really vita who shines.

now, of course, i am off to read orlando and will probably be bedridden with all my swooning by the end of this.