Jan 25 2008
Expressing feelings
…But don’t you see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older) and so I have to take my little precautions. Thats why I put the emphasis on ‘recording’ rather than feeling. But donkey West knows she has broken down more ramparts than anyone. And isnt there something obscure in you? There’s something that doesn’t vibrate in you: It may be purposely — you don’t let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted — God knows what…It’s in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central transparency — sometimes fails you there too….
Virgina Woolf, letter to Vita Sackville-West. November 19, 1926
As I read this I thought of how many of us would identify with Woolf’s words. Human beings have different ways of showing and hiding emotions. Here Woolf speaks about “precautions”. Who doesn’t take precautions in relationships? Maybe some of us don’t even when we feel that something does not “vibrate” in the other, and when we start assessing what the other is like in the presence of other people but us.
History would claim Vita was a free woman, able to do as she pleased. Maybe her freedom resided in the way she did not have to take precautions, in this non-vibration Woolf so clearly felt. There is nothing more difficult than to chase a vibration that does not exist. Paradoxically, the other is not aware of what goes on inside, and becomes a rampart like the ones Vita herself “broke down”. That is the cost of freedom.
