NCERT Textbook: Non-Fiction: The Mark on the Wall | Class 12 English Kaleidoscope - Humanities/Arts PDF Download

 Page 1


136/KALEIDOSCOPE
The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate
shades of mental experience.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year
that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle  tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red
2 2
2 2 2
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
2024-25
Page 2


136/KALEIDOSCOPE
The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate
shades of mental experience.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year
that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle  tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red
2 2
2 2 2
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
2024-25
137/THE MARK ON THE WALL
knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my
relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is
an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white
wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so
feverishly, and then leave it... If that mark was made by a
nail, it can’t have been for a picture; it must have been for a
miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered
curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before
us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture
for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such
queer places, because one will never see them again, never
know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house
because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so
he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion
art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder,
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and
the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe
it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for
that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to
one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a
thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear
me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of
our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this
living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a
few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that
seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat
would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird
cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone,
and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the
2024-25
Page 3


136/KALEIDOSCOPE
The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate
shades of mental experience.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year
that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle  tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red
2 2
2 2 2
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
2024-25
137/THE MARK ON THE WALL
knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my
relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is
an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white
wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so
feverishly, and then leave it... If that mark was made by a
nail, it can’t have been for a picture; it must have been for a
miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered
curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before
us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture
for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such
queer places, because one will never see them again, never
know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house
because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so
he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion
art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder,
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and
the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe
it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for
that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to
one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a
thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear
me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of
our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this
living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a
few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that
seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat
would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird
cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone,
and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the
2024-25
138/KALEIDOSCOPE
roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be
sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that
I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if
one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to
being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s
hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling
head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s
hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that
seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste
and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green
stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges
one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one
not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless,
unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the
grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are
trees and which are men and women, or whether there are
such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty
years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and
dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up
perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim
pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more
definite, become—I don’t know what...
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It
may even be caused by some round black substance, such
as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not
being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the
mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say,
buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly
refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the
pane... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never
to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to
slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of
hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,
away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To
steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that
2024-25
Page 4


136/KALEIDOSCOPE
The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate
shades of mental experience.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year
that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle  tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red
2 2
2 2 2
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
2024-25
137/THE MARK ON THE WALL
knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my
relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is
an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white
wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so
feverishly, and then leave it... If that mark was made by a
nail, it can’t have been for a picture; it must have been for a
miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered
curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before
us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture
for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such
queer places, because one will never see them again, never
know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house
because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so
he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion
art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder,
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and
the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe
it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for
that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to
one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a
thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear
me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of
our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this
living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a
few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that
seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat
would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird
cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone,
and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the
2024-25
138/KALEIDOSCOPE
roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be
sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that
I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if
one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to
being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s
hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling
head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s
hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that
seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste
and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green
stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges
one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one
not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless,
unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the
grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are
trees and which are men and women, or whether there are
such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty
years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and
dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up
perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim
pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more
definite, become—I don’t know what...
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It
may even be caused by some round black substance, such
as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not
being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the
mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say,
buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly
refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the
pane... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never
to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to
slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of
hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,
away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To
steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that
2024-25
139/THE MARK ON THE WALL
passes... Shakespeare... Well, he will do as well as another.
A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair, and looked
into the fire, so—a shower of ideas fell perpetually from
some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant
his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through
the open door—for this scene is supposed to take place on
a summer’s evening—but how dull this is, this historical
fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon
a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting
credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts,
and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-
coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to
hear their  own praises. They are not thoughts directly
praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are
thoughts like this:
‘And then I came into the room. They were discussing
botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap
on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said,
must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First.
What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I
asked—(but I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with
purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the
time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind,
lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I
should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for
a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how
instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry
or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too
unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not
so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance.
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears,
and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all
about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person
which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow,
bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived
in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground
railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for
the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And
the novelists in future will realise more and more the
2024-25
Page 5


136/KALEIDOSCOPE
The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew
up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her
father’s extensive library. The famous group of
intellectuals which came to be known as the
Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of
Cambridge University graduates and their friends in
Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia
started the Hogarth Press which became a successful
publishing house.
In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse,
she experimented with new techniques, particularly
new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed
that much imaginative literature is false to life because
it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our
experiences actually flow together like a stream.
This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate
shades of mental experience.
Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year
that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In
order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one
saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow
light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums
in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must
have been the winter time, and we had just finished our
tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I
looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time.
I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye
lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old
fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle  tower
came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red
2 2
2 2 2
Virginia Woolf
1882-1941
2024-25
137/THE MARK ON THE WALL
knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my
relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is
an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps.
The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white
wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.
How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object,
lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so
feverishly, and then leave it... If that mark was made by a
nail, it can’t have been for a picture; it must have been for a
miniature—the miniature of a lady with white powdered
curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations.
A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before
us would have chosen pictures in that way—an old picture
for an old room. That is the sort of people they were—very
interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such
queer places, because one will never see them again, never
know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house
because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so
he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion
art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder,
as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and
the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back
garden of the suburban villa as one rushes past in the train.
But for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe
it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for
that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to
one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a
thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear
me, the mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought! The
ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of
our possessions we have—what an accidental affair this
living is after all our civilization—let me just count over a
few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that
seems always the most mysterious of losses—what cat
would gnaw, what rat would nibble—three pale blue
canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird
cages, the iron hoops, the steel skates, the Queen Anne
coal-scuttle, the bagatelle board, the hand organ—all gone,
and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the
2024-25
138/KALEIDOSCOPE
roots of turnips. What a scraping paring affair it is to be
sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that
I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if
one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to
being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—
landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s
hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely naked! Tumbling
head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper
parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s
hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that
seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste
and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard...
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green
stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges
one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one
not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless,
unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the
grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are
trees and which are men and women, or whether there are
such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty
years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and
dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up
perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim
pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more
definite, become—I don’t know what...
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It
may even be caused by some round black substance, such
as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not
being a very vigilant housekeeper—look at the dust on the
mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say,
buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly
refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the
pane... I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never
to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to
slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of
hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper,
away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To
steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that
2024-25
139/THE MARK ON THE WALL
passes... Shakespeare... Well, he will do as well as another.
A man who sat himself solidly in an armchair, and looked
into the fire, so—a shower of ideas fell perpetually from
some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant
his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through
the open door—for this scene is supposed to take place on
a summer’s evening—but how dull this is, this historical
fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon
a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting
credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts,
and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-
coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to
hear their  own praises. They are not thoughts directly
praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are
thoughts like this:
‘And then I came into the room. They were discussing
botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap
on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said,
must have been sown in the reign of Charles the First.
What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First? I
asked—(but I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with
purple tassels to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the
time I’m dressing up the figure of myself in my own mind,
lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I
should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for
a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how
instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry
or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too
unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not
so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance.
Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears,
and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all
about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person
which is seen by other people—what an airless, shallow,
bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived
in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground
railways we are looking into the mirror; that accounts for
the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And
the novelists in future will realise more and more the
2024-25
140/KALEIDOSCOPE
importance of these reflections, for of course there is not
one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are
the depths they will explore, those the phantoms they will
pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more
out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as
the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps—but these
generalisations are very worthless. The military sound of
the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet
ministers—a whole class of things indeed which, as a child,
one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, from which
one could not depart save at the risk of nameless
damnation. Generalisations bring back somehow Sunday
in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons,
and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits—
like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a
certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule
for everything. The rule for tablecloths at that particular
period was that they should be made of tapestry with little
yellow compartments marked upon them, such as you may
see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the
royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real
tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was
to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons,
Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not
entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the
damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only
a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place
of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men
perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of
view which governs our lives which sets the standard, which
established Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has
become, I suppose, since the war, half a phantom to many
men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be laughed
into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany
sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell
and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of
illegitimate freedom—if freedom exists...
2024-25