The Grumpy Vegan just finished Julia Briggs’ Virginia Woolf–An inner life. This is a stupendous book. Part biography and part literary criticism, each chapter focuses on one or more of Virginia’s fiction and nonfiction. It’s a brilliant insight into Virginia’s creative process. Briggs’ writes with great insight.
As the guardians and interpreters of culture, artists are or become peculiarly receptive, or vulnerable to their times. Though Woolf did not believe in a personal God, “A Sketch of the Past” shows that she did believe in some kind of ‘world soul’ embodied in beauty, form and meaning, and transmitted by great artists: ‘all human beings — are connected with this; … the whole world is a work of art; … we are parts of the works of art … we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.’ But if we are the words and the music, we must also participate in evil creations — in bombs, concentration camps and gas chambers.
