unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.

There was nothing secure, for some of us, no glue.

She, too, will show him—her physician husband—her move into madness a rejection of his assessment. You don’t think I’m mad? Well, I’ll show you. It is not enough—not for the narrator, not for Septimus—to tell the story of their madness; they must act it out.

Woolf understood both the protective quality—a numbing of feeling—and the great danger of madness: to be so far out with no way back, and to lose all means of communicating that gap.

Home from the war, the rigidity and formality of British life appear absurd. Septimus’s madness is an untethering—he is both unable to feel and yet too porous; he has a growing sense that the world is sending him messages.

Now I read the helplessness at the heart of the story—a learned helplessness—that I knew too well. The desire to be told who you are, what you need.

It is closer to Method acting than what we call literary analysis. For me, it began with feeling. As Hilton Als put it, If I can’t feel it, I can’t write it.

To be able to make meaning of it and apply the meaning to one’s life—this is something else altogether.

I wanted to know how to live. For Esther, how to live was to reject life, to reach the limits of it, to imagine a way out.