the lonely lake, the changes refracted through the touches of
the rays of the lighthouse and the sun, and the union of a house with the sea.
V. Woolf is in the rays barely touching the dreamy reverie, piercing the
hydrostatic layers that hold the house back from emerging clearly into
consciousness and the wilds of the night. She is also the ruler of the sea
(consciousness), like Neptune - enraged by the audacity to take without his
permission, to steal from the lavish decoration of his table a detail - a pear
and spoil the decoration of the feast, the composition from Rose's fruit bowl,
from Lilly's picture. The rhythm is implied through certain alternations - of
the titles of the individual parts; of the actions inherent in the habits and
profession of each character, through certain identical actions and gestures of
different people at the beginning and at the end of the novel. This is how the
rhythm of nature and the rhythm of the life of the civilized, separated from
nature, man is achieved, a concept close to the concept of the ancient Greek
poets, who express through the harmonious arrangement[xvi]
of word combinations the noises of actions that describe ... but in the
inverted perspective - through the selection and arrangement of colors, not
sounds. Some of these actions provoke the memory and senses of the characters
in the novel and awaken individual memories in them. There is a repetition of
certain moments and actions in smaller intervals of time in separate chapters:
knitting, drawing, cutting out figures from a magazine, abruptly stopping the
thought at a sudden noise (shot, rushing, reciting in a loud voice…); frequent
descriptions of the same details: objects, places, natural pictures, learned
banal phrases, wisdom, poems... (the stone pot with the fly-toto, the hedge,
the clusters of red viburnum). Rhythm is also mentioned in the work itself: the
fountain of foaming water that erupts every evening in bursts and the pulsating
colors of the bay (37); about the rhythm between the musical tones to which Mr.
and Mrs. Ramsay are compared (57-58); the expectation of rhythm in the creation
of the picture (184), etc. In "Time Passes" there is a rhythmicity in
the way in which the individual fragmentary excerpts are arranged, underlining
in few words, but in depth, what is happening in the world among philosophers,
mystics and warriors. They piece together the fragmentary excerpts (from
hearsay, fragments of articles, columns, or press headlines) announcing the
death of Mrs. Ramsay, Andrew, and Prue's wedding and death. They are not placed
in complete symmetry, but create a sense of such in the unfolding of the
narrative, because there is rhythm, alternation and arrangement in a certain
part of the text space. In the third of these (156) mention is made of the
visions of mystics and philosophers in which human flesh is broken into atoms
and stars.
Th
