Sublime

inventing differences, when people, heaven knows,

But was it nothing but looks? people said. What was there behind it

Men, and women too, letting go the multiplicity of things, had allowed themselves with her the relief of simplicity.

different enough without that.

there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, ‘This is he,’ or, ‘This is she.’

The essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.

pursue truth with such astonishing

that any other eyes should see the residue of her thirty-three years, the deposit of each day’s living,