In the summer of 2018 I travelled to London and St Ives to explore Virginia Woolf’s England. The trip was funded through the Barbara Rooke Travel Prize, a prize awarded to a graduating English major by my alma mater’s Department of English Literature.
This was written in a journal on my last day in England, while I was on the train from Cornwall to London.
On the train to London, listening currently to “Us & Them” by Pink Floyd, going backwards at 100 km/hr and waiting for my postcards to dry. Strangers asleep beside me. The English countryside passing me as if I slide backwards in time, and things undo themselves like a rewinded VHS tape. Who’s to say what comes before and after? Me? Them? I made this journey four days ago in the opposite direction, and now I know more than I did then.
This trip has had a nice circularity to it. I haven’t cared what my handwriting looks like in this book, because it’s for my eyes only. My later-eyes, who will know more than I do now. And maybe I’ll realize something, reading this later, in a different place. I’ve realized the importance of place on this trip. Woolf couldn’t have written that book without that town, without that lighthouse, without its distance and its nearness. How different our lives would be, without certain places, certain people, certain views.
I always feel content at the end of a trip like this. It’s bittersweet, yes, but also conclusive. This has bookended my undergrad degree in a way much more satisfying than a ceremony. This was ceremonious in its indifference to ceremony. In not being the experience everyone has — this was mine and mine alone. It was for me and yet not about me. It was for Virginia, and for all that she means to me.
My adoptive aunt Virginia. She taught me things without knowing me. In her indifference to me, I learned about myself. I learned about how even though people and places are often different, they’re more similar than initially thought. And that’s both comforting and not, because it reminds me that I’m not special, but also that I’m not alone. There are so many humans, and we teach one another with our differences and similarities. We learn together. We share. We see and we smile. We want the same things, and we can help each other get them just as much as we can impede one another. It’s a choice we have to make over and over, and it leads us in different directions, but we owe it to both ourselves and other people to do our best.
On day one here, the subway doors at Heathrow closed on my backpack, effectively trapping me, with no time to mind the gap. And two English men, who could’ve been my dad’s cousins, pried open the doors for me. And I got where I needed to go.
On my second day in St Ives, I walked four hours up the coast, and would’ve had to walk back, but my B&B hosts were there (by my luck, or their compassion, I’ll never know) and they gave me a ride back to St Ives.
On day one in London, in Regent’s Park, I people watched and I saw so many people doing things and seeing things, a woman reading on a bench, a couple that looked like they’d waited years to be exactly where they were, a child with her lopsided ice cream cone.
Yesterday I took a family photo for strangers, and that photo might hang in their house for years, ages longer than we spoke or briefly knew each other.
Any of these people could’ve been me, and any of their lives might’ve been mine. And we influence one another’s lives in small, intentional ways; opening a door for a father with a stroller, pointing out which restaurants to attend and avoid, sharing stories and facts we wouldn’t otherwise have heard, and we’re changed because of it.
Virginia saw that. She saw that one person’s consciousness can connect with another’s for an instant, and the same thing might occur to two completely different people, and in that moment, we’re one mind, despite our differences. And because of our differences, we are led in different directions from the point of contact. It weaves its way through city streets, and ricochets off the waves and rocks, and the tide goes in and out, just as we do. And some things, like the lighthouse, remain a little out of reach for a long time.
It’s in our pursuit of these things we want, what we can see, that we find things we didn’t know we wanted or needed to know, to learn. To get us past the things we know, or pretend to know, and beyond into spaces and places we didn’t ever imagine could exist. The spaces that shape the shape of us. Of me. I went to the lighthouse, now I’m going home. The two are not dissimilar, but they mean different things to me. A place can ingrain itself in you. They meant things differently to Virginia. They were embedded in her differently than in me. But because of her, I learned and was affected, and I let myself be changed, even if only in small, intentional ways.