To The Lighthouse

To The Lighthouse makes me feel (sea)sick...
Third read and I'm still not impressed. To me, it feels like someone turned 90210 into a book and inserted some literary thought. Regardless of the level or value of the literary thought, it's still 90210. "In this chapter David learns drugs are bad, Brenda and Dillon have trouble, and Donna makes a new friend!" So I still don't like it.

Boats float on water, the great metaphor for change...
The imagery behind boats is worth examining. The lighthouse, while obviously the metaphor for awakening (made blindingly clear between the end of the 2nd section and the title for the third section), is the destination, the subject or noun, the goal. The ships are a the vehicle to get to the destination, the verb or action, the means. There was a terrific quote somewhere in the middle of the book about the growth of trees and then ships are mentioned shortly after. Trees are semi-ladders for the metaphor of ascension. The branches act as rungs and the connection with nature/growth often exceeds that of an actual ladder. In this quote (I don't have a page number), there is a specific reference to trees and then shortly after follows the ships. Trees... ships. The ships come from the trees. The ships give people the agency needed to reach the lighthouse.

Something we've already studied in other works...
There was another good quote (I don't have a page number for this one either) near the end of the book. It talks about people hurrying up with their reading so they can finish. This bookends nicely with a quote from p43, "Books, she thought, grew of themselves. She never had time to read them." There are other sandwichings in the beginning and ending of the book. Most notable of these are the aggressive murderous thoughts held by men. I think the murderous rage moments represent passion and hate. I think the book references represent consideration and imagination. These are each qualities found in any given family/relationship so I think they were inserted overtly into the beginning and ending of the book as markers signifying that things exist in between. This is a different approach towards drawing dots and helping us make connections than the other authors we have studied have taken.

Summary
I'm sure everyone in this class has watched or been exposed to a movie which is a complete and total waste of time. You know that feeling of "I want those 2 hours of my life back"? That's what I feel with this book. I can't be finished with it soon enough.

Reflections
I think I may be unnecessarily critical about some of these books and I feel I better understand why that is. First, I know what I'm interested in and these texts aren't it. Second, I'm getting progressively more and more crunched for time. A weekend spent rereading Lighthouse is a weekend I could've spent with my project. Third, drawing connections between these different texts seems uncommonly difficult. Yeah, they're all supposed to be related to epiphanies but I don't feel they cover the damn things as clearly as they could. I don't feel like I'm getting as much out of these texts about epiphanies as I feel I should be getting out of them. Finally, I feel like none of these texts have addressed epiphanies as I would have them do it (but that's a whole different post in itself). I'll have a decent post on epiphanies for you sometime tomorrow evening.