Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Like Fish In A Net

"He tried to analyze this favorite theme of his — walking, different people walking to Norwich. He thought at once of the lark, of the sky, of the view. The walkers' thoughts and emotions were largely made up of these outside influences. Walking thoughts were half sky; if you could submit them to chemical analysis you would find that they had some grains of colour in them, some gallons or quarts or pints of air attached to them. This at once made them airier, more impersonal. But in this room, thoughts were jostled together like fish in a net, struggling, scraping each other's scales off, and becoming, in the effort to escape, —for all thinking was an effort to make thought escape from the thinker's mind past all obstacles as completely as possible: all society is an attempt to seize and influence and coerce each thought as it appears and force it to yield to another." —Virginia Woolf, A Simple Melody