From the Diary of Virginia Woolf

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something . . . so 
elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful 
that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep 
old desk . . . in which one flings a mass of odds and ends 
without looking them through.  I should like to come back, after 
a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself 
and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously 
do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life.

Why is life so tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. 
I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the end. 
But why do I feel this: Now that I say it I don't feel it. The fire 
burns; we are going to hear The Beggar's Opera. Only it lies all 
about me; I can't keep my eyes shut . . . And with it all how happy 
I am - if it weren't for my feeling that it's a strip of pavement 
over an abyss.

Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance:
Woman thinks:
He does.
Organ plays.
She writes.
They say:
She sings.
Night speaks.
They miss.

Yesterday we went to Hardy's funeral. What did I think of? Of Max 
Beerbohm's letter . . . or a lecture . . . about women's writing. 
At intervals some emotion broke in. But I doubt the capacity of 
the human animal for being dignified in ceremony. One catches a 
bishop's frown and twitch; sees his polished shiny nose; suspects 
the rapt spectacled young priest, gazing at the cross he carries, 
of being a humbug . . . next here is the coffin, an overgrown one; 
like a stage coffin, covered with a white satin cloth; bearers 
elderly gentlemen rather red and stiff, holding to the corners; 
pigeons flying outside . . . processions to poets corner; 
dramatic "In sure and certain hope of immortality" perhaps 
melodramatic . . . Over all this broods for me some uneasy sense 
of change and mortality and how partings are deaths; and then a 
sense of my own fame . . . and a sense of the futility of it all.

Rome: tea. Tea in café. Ladies in bright coats and white hats. 
Music. Look out and see people like movies . . . Ices. 
Old man who haunts the Greco . . . Fierce large jowled old 
ladies . . . talking about Monaco. Talleyrand. Some very 
poor black wispy women. The effect of dowdiness produced 
by wispy hair. Sunday café . . . Very cold. The prime Minister's 
letter offering to recommend me for the Companion of Honour. No.

This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk . . . the war - 
our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation - has 
taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I 
have no surroundings . . . Those familiar circumlocutions - 
those standards - which have for so many years given back an 
echo and so thickened my identity are all wide and wild as 
the desert now. I mean, there is no "autumn," no winter. 
We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . and then? I can't 
conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.

How beautiful they were, those old people - I mean father and 
mother - how simple, how clear, how untroubled. I have been 
dipping into old letters and father's memoirs. He loved her: 
oh and was so candid and reasonable and transparent . . . 
How serene and gay even, their life reads to me: no mud; 
no whirlpools. And so human - with the children and the 
little hum and song of the nursery. But if I read as a 
contemporary I shall lose my child's vision and so must
stop. Nothing turbulent; nothing involved; no introspection.

No: I intend no introspection. I mark Henry James' sentence: 
Observe perpetually. Observe the oncome of age. Observe greed.
Observe my own despondency. By that means it becomes 
serviceable. Or so I hope. I insist upon spending this 
time to the best advantage. I will go down with my colours 
flying . . . Occupation is essential. And now with some pleasure 
I find that it's seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and 
sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain 
hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.