READING CHALLENGE: To the end of To The Lighthouse.

I set myself a challenge to read three books that I had singularly failed to read previously, despite their accusing presence on my shelves. My failure was due to a different cause in each case, but I have now plunged in and tackled the first of those books: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

What held me back for so long was the embarrassing fact that someone recommended it to me. “You should read it. You’ll love the bits about the house.” It is a sad reflection on the ridiculous contrariness of human nature, or at least of my nature, that the moment someone tells me I should do something, my brain immediately digs its heels in and resists. Which is a challenge as brains don’t have heels.

I did make a feeble attempt to show willing and was immediately up against the main issue of the book, namely Virginia Woolf’s determination, or was it mere inclination, to write, without pausing for consideration of the reader’s inability to recall how it all began, sentences that meander without a break for the better of a page, or indeed several pages, which I fully comprehend as being intended to convey the equally meandering flow of consciousness of a variety of characters, whose trail of undisciplined thoughts, internalised fears and judgemental criticisms interweave in a continuous but everchanging tapestry of… Sorry, even I have lost track of where I was going with that. I quite like the occasional short sentence. Abrupt, even.

But I have now taken a run at the book again and made it to the end. Let me say, straight off, that yes I really did like the bits about the house, mostly conveyed in the second section, Time Passes. For the rest…

While I was reading it, and pottering about at various tasks, I was sharing a flat with an object I’d mistaken at first for a metal turtle, abandoned in the corner of the living room. It turned out to be a robot vacuum cleaner, sitting quietly on its charging bay, until I was left alone to read my book. I don’t know if someone had switched it on or if it decided of its own accord to set to work, but there it was, chugging around the flat, quietly minding its own business, turning whenever it bumped into walls and having mild panic attacks when it landed in corners. It confronted obstacles stoically, merely turning to pursue a new course.

Sometimes, the obstacle was me. Sometimes I would step aside, or hop over it as it headed my way, resisting the suspicion that it was out to get me. It would disappear to bump its way around another room, and I would forget about it completely. Then it would be back, beavering away around me, cleaning every corner of the kitchen floor, three, four, five times and yet, miraculously, always failing to pick up the one crumb that was the single visible of speck of dirt on that depressingly immaculate floor.

I would watch it for a while, mesmerised, thinking, if I just got out a dustpan and brush, I could sweep up that one crumb in two seconds. But no, I was going to leave it to this robot with a clear case of obsessive compulsive disorder. I would read a page or two of To The Lighthouse and there it would be again, coming up against me, turning away, totally absorbed in its task. I wondered what was going on in its electronic brain. Did it enjoy its work? Did it care whether it did a good job or not? Did it take satisfaction in a clean floor?

Once or twice it disappeared into another room and, after some little while of suspiciously repetitive chugging, I would follow it in and find it endlessly shuffling back and forth in a corner, entangled on a trailing cable. I felt compelled to lift it and rescue it. It never thanked me. Did it even experience gratitude?

What has this to do with To The Lighthouse? Everything. It perfectly matched my reading of the book. Two entities in a house, moving around each other, each lost in their own thoughts and occupations, making necessary adjustments to accommodate each other when absolutely necessary but otherwise quite apart, keeping their thoughts to themselves in splendid isolation. The characters gathered at the Ramsays’ holiday house on Skye are all busy with their own thoughts, summing up, judging, condemning or loving each other. But, when forced into actual confrontation with each other, their thoughts remain private and are replaced by polite, predictable social niceties. I and the vacuum cleaner could have fitted into that gathering and apart from Mrs Ramsay asking if either of us needed stamps, we would both have passed without comment. All the characters would have given us some thought, and probably found us irritating, but no one would have mentioned it.

I gave the robot far too much thought. Did it return the compliment? Did it regard me as the Mrs Ramsay of the flat? Or as Charles Tansley? I shall never know. I reached the end of the book and the vacuum cleaner finally gave a sigh and settled back on its charging bay with extreme fatigue. It had fulfilled its mission. And it still hadn’t picked up that one crumb.