If I am capable of change, I think…, it will begin there, in language. A risk: it may end there too. One cannot trick words with a pratfall; they will only turn away. I have to actually leap off an edge, not knowing whether they will rise up to meet me.

… Woolf knew… that the brain and the page are also real places. One moves through life composing, not copy, but the sentences through which the world and one's heart become known.

Once, in Florence, practicing her craft in her travel diary, Woolf reminded herself of the dangers of description: "What one records is really the state of one's own mind." I do love to be one; it is my favorite pronoun. It conjures me up, over there, where I can see myself, like a word tried out upon the page. One has arrived at the gate to Knole.

In her diary, [Woolf] recollects Strachey saying at some point, "We can only live if we see through illusion," a statement whose phrasing she finds incommensurate with the space it occupies in her mind. It is not only his words she finds there, she explains: "This saying of Lytton's has always come pictorially, with heat, flowers, grass, summer, &

… the fog will turn to the slow and awful bloom of recognition that the only constancy or connection I can find between that night and this moment … is the awareness that I am performing, that I am reciting the lines and movements I've seen others speak and make, and I cannot bear the flatness of myself, nor the flimsiness of my disguise. I get

[Virginia Woolf] even wrote of words as moths, noting how in daily life "[W]e refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die."

One friend proposed a question: What did everyone hope to learn in the coming year? What were our ambitions? I cringed at my mother's answer: I just want to continue to help people with my art. That's not what it's for, I wanted to say. The smoothness of the idea made me recoil. What, I wanted to ask, might she have been capable of if she could

… the historian Maya Jasanoff observes that "Erasing history' is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn't erasing history; it's revising cultural priorities … Burning documents: now that's erasing history."

I sent my sister the clip. "I remember it as something that happened to US," she texted back. "We invented mirror neurons."

She's right, I thought. So many events felt this way as they unfolded in our childhood, the two of us close and in joint understanding.