Since it’s extra credit I’m going to try to take a stab at the practical knowledge in To the Lighthouse. This is my attempt to answer Lily’s great question at the beginning of the last section “What is the meaning?”
I want to preface this with the following: I received a copy of Oxford 4th edition of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the mail yesterday. I haven’t gotten a chance to dive into it yet but it sits right next to my desk staring me in the face. I think its influence has gotten to me without me even opening the book.
A seemingly insignificant line from the book stuck out to me as I finished reading tonight and it largely provides the basis for my interpretation of “the stuff that matters.” Twice near the end of the novel, as Lily sits at her easel switching her gaze between the canvas and the bay, she remarks as follows:
“The Lighthouse looked this morning to be at an immense distance” (156 & 182)
Northrop Frye said that the Lighthouse is a common metaphor for an epiphany. I think the lighthouse is more than just the epiphany, it represents some combination of purpose, destiny, goal, desire, and any number of other nouns that reassure humans that life is worth living. The lighthouse however, isn’t just some petty reassurance of life like a good round of golf, or a complimentary dinner. The lighthouse represents the thing in life that fills the gaping hole of uncertainty that occurs in everyone’s soul as they go from point A to point B. Reaching the lighthouse is when you become in tune with your ultimate purpose on this earth. (sorry this all sounds so cheesy but I am a bit too lazy to find more eloquent words to describe my thoughts). And like the quote suggests some times that thing seems at an immense distance.
This purpose is unique to each and every individual; it is why there can be 6 billion unique people on the planet. I hesitate to call it fate because while everyone meets their fate, some people never find this unique thing in life; they die first (like Andrew who was supposed to be a great mathematician) or they look in the wrong place (Mr. Ramsay pretends to be a philosopher but is really just an asshole) or they just don’t care (Minta loves to act stupid and party).
As for Lily, she constantly struggles to find this purpose. Throughout the book she is lost at different points of the journey. She wonders “Where to begin?—that was the question at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made” (157). Lily comprehends what she must do, she must start, she must begin her search for her purpose, she must find her inscape.
It’s funny, I never thought to connect Hopkins’ theory of inscape with the self. I thought inscape was left for those things outside of us, that inscape was used to understand the world around us not within us. I don’t know why I didn’t connect this idea but To the Lighthouse worked it out of me.
First Practical lesson: To find our inscape, our uniqueness, our god given cosmic purpose, we must take a risk and begin looking.
For nearly 50 pages after Lily begins, she struggles. She has crises of faith. She screams out God’s name…or rather Mrs. Ramsay’s name. Finding personal inscape is no easy task. Much of the time “the urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low. Then one gave it up: the idea sunk back again; then one became like most middle-aged people, cautious, furtive, with wrinkles between the eyes and a look of perpetual apprehension” (178). Early failure creates emptiness. For Lily “to want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain” (176).
Second Practical Lesson: Finding personal inscape is difficult. Sometimes the struggles will fill the soul with such emptiness and despair that quitting feels like the only option. But quitting is not an option. As an old football coach once told me, “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.”
But Lily keeps trying. Little things keep her going like reflecting on the boat Cam, James, and Mr. Ramsey took to the lighthouse. It is the little things that keep her motivated. It’s the little things that make her ask “Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—startling, unexpected, unknown?
Third Practical Lesson: Little things are Very Very Big Things
Ultimately Lily finds her “vision.” She paints her masterpiece. Ultimately James receives affection from his father. Ultimately Carmichael the Sea Monster writes his book of poems. Ultimately Mrs. Ramsay is stared upon as she ascends the stairs and all the people recognize her for her true self, the life giver, mother earth, God.
Fourth Practical Lesson: Our personal Inscape exists and though difficult, it is attainable.
How can we be sure about this fourth practical lesson? Cam says it best while crossing the ocean… “Small as it was, and shaped something like a leaf stood on its end with the gold-sprinkled waters flowing in and about it, it had…a place in the universe—even that little island” (189). I’d like to think I’m just as much or more significant than that little island; I must have a place in the universe too.
Funny, Frye also says an island is often the representation of an epiphany. However I think Cam is referring to herself and James and Lily and Mrs. Ramsay and Mr. Ramsay and Carmichael and the rest of humanity when she refers to the “Island.” Perhaps we are our own epiphany?
Finally, where does Mrs. Ramsay fit in? I have alluded to it earlier in this blog. Mrs. Ramsay is the mother goddess or perhaps God herself. When the characters reflect on the divine (especially Lily) they are reflecting on Mrs. Ramsay. She is a giver, a charity worker, a creator of order, a mother, a wife, a writer, a reader, and a lover. She is the embodiment of a Deity. She has completely instressed her inscape. As Mr. Ramsay put it, she has reached Z.
Post Script: I may not love this book, but I respect the hell out of it. I probably respect it enough to read it again sometime. Dr. S says if a book disgusts you, there is either something wrong with you or something wrong with the book. Needless to say I was not disgusted and by the end, nor was I bored.
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