Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf

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Drawing Series, Woman’s face 3,
pastels and acrylics on acid-free paper
by Barbara Agreste.

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Virginia Woolf and her story.

I will never understand Virginia Woolf‘s story, I mean the way it ended. As with Ophelia, the fictional character from Shakespeare, I will analyse Virginia Woolf’s suicide this time. Why am I interested in it? Because it is something I fail to understand completely, and surely to imagine how such an act of removing oneself’s life is possible, I would have to dig deeply into the reasons beyond it.

I can imagine suicide as occurring when someone has no more choices, or even better, when someone has to make a choice, and often dying is the only one to make alongside other options. So Viriginia Woolf, had no better choices than to die at one point of her life.

What could have happened to so intelligent a woman? Is intelligence itself not enough to find a solution better than suicide, or is the very capacity to understand things, and situations better than others, the very road leading to such a courageous act of profanation?

Profanation of the body if anything. Liberation of the mind from the closed, throttling spirals of depression. “The waves”: when I begun reading it, I could never continue. Being me and Virginia Woolf too similar, I had to stay away from her mind and way of thinking, for my own sake, to avoid suicide.

I know how important is to have a room of your own Virginia. I can say that, if I could no longer have my own space which I use to protect myself from others, I would suicide too. Perhaps the key to suicide is “others” instead of “self”.

And when you said I do not want to bear “The Hours” before my slow death or decay? There was no longer anything to move for, nothing worth getting up and walk, except walking into that lake. Were those the tedious Hours of acknowledging something which would be better to end quickly? Yes, now I understand.

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