An Aquarian reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

the astrology of woolf's telling of time

Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse follows the Ramsey family through time, but rather than being about the Ramseys and their everyday lives, it's about time itself. Her fascination with the revolutionary physics of her era—from Einstein's relativity to wave-particle duality—is evident in this book, though subtle (as it should be). She wasn't content with just being an artist; she was a scholar, a scientist. She loved knowledge for knowledge's sake. She was an Aquarius, of course.

This is a book best studied like poetry, a lyric essay, or a philosophy dissertation.

A story where nothing happens; everything changes.

Yet, this was a challenging read! It took some time for my social-media-addled brain to adjust to the pages-long streams of consciousness. The book worked best when I "read it aloud in my head" (not my usual reading style—I tend to watch a movie with my inner eye). Only then could I truly see *it*, and reading felt like walking through a painting as a symphony played.

The imagery is breathtakingly beautiful and surreal, whether Woolf is depicting the mundane (a housekeeper flitting from room to room), revealing heart-shattering realities (Lily yearning and yelling for Mrs. Ramsay), or untangling existential conundrums (the watching eye of the lighthouse). A scene that will stay with me is Mrs. Ramsay reading poetry while knitting and feeling as if she were swinging from branch to branch, flower to flower, and ascending. It’s such a succinctly accurate and elegant portrayal of the poetic experience.

But everything is gorgeously framed. The book's seemingly small, fleeting moments evoke Mrs. Ramsay's poignant line, which I think is the central meaning behind the lighthouse metaphor, "Time stands still here." Perhaps this was an allusion to wave-particle duality. Though the strobe of the lighthouse shifted to and fro, the eye itself remained fixed. It's both a mystical and materialistic observation, and radical either way.

My favorite section was "Time Passes" (made my eyes glisten). This felt like the perfect end-of-summer (read this summer '24), end-of-my-twenties book. I'll read this again someday.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​