Image courtesy of Encyclopædia Britannica. Photo: Dave Shafer / © New Hampshire Division of Travel and Tourism Development.
I spent several hours of my last winter break as a Columbia student rereading To The Lighthouse. The only other time I had read it had been three years earlier, in Literature Humanities. I remembered finding it dense and tiring, not just because of the text itself but because of the speed with which we had to read it. I remembered my Belgian professor telling us that we had to visit the Isle of Sky, where the novel is set, and I remembered the Ramsays’ six-year-old son wanting to kill his father. And I remembered that we had been reading it when the weather had become really warm for the first time, and everyone was out on the lawns—my first Columbia spring—and there I was, sitting on a bench in Morningside Park on a sunny morning, trying to follow Virginia Woolf’s serpentine sentences.
Partly then, rereading the novel as an English major who was nearing graduation was a way of coming full circle. Since that spring I had read many novels and taken many English classes, and I thought that the book would be more accessible to me now. It would be a way of closing the loop of my time at Columbia and seeing how far I had come as a reader. My other reason was that this particular novel had come up many times in those three years, invariably as an example of novelistic greatness, and I felt that my rushed Lit Hum reading had not led to my appreciating the book as it deserved. It was my girlfriend’s favorite book, it was a book that professors often brought up, it was a book that my father decided to read and then praised enthusiastically. A week or so before the break, I was having lunch with a friend who mentioned in passing that To The Lighthouse was, for him, “everything that a novel could be.” I decided then that I had to read it again.
