“Life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing”

This is the moment when the thinness of life first opens into view for Rachel Vinrace. Rachel is a single, 24-year old, British ingénue at the center of Viginia Woolf’s early work, The Voyage Out, a story of self-discovery. She is sitting alone at a window in a busy fictional South American port hotel, guest of her aunt and uncle, her first time abroad following a sheltered life in London, and listening to the jumble of disconnected sounds surrounding her. She is tapping her finger on the arm of a chair to help center herself, but she is suddenly struck by the enormity of life—her life—coming to an end. And she thinks, “Life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing, as in time she would vanish…”

“Her dissolution became so complete,” Woolf writes, “that she could not raise her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and looking always at the same spot. It became stranger and stranger. She was overcome with awe that things should exist at all…. She forgot that she had any fingers to raise…. The things that existed were so immense and so desolate…”

“Life, what was that? It was only a light passing over the surface and vanishing.”

 Virginia Woolf, a moment of meaningful reflection still.

On the Narrow Ledge

Biology is not destiny. Each of us should be be free to choose our life, free of children or not, mindful of the admonishment, “Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)

Consider the emptiness of a life without choice. Consider Miranda, the young woman at the center of Katherine Anne Porter’s short story, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Miranda is sick and alone in the hospital during the 1918 flu epidemic, and thousands are dying around her, including a soldier she feverishly thinks about—a relationship that may be more imaginary than real.

Porter writes, “She lay on a narrow ledge, over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it… thinking, There it is, there it is at last, it is very simple; and soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all.”

“Words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all.”

Our place in the universe on this narrow ledge? Unfathomable.