Jilanne Hoffmann

Once again, I dip into Woolf’s writings and find treasure, of the wry variety. Here’s the opening paragraph from her essay, “Street Haunting,” collected in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays:

“No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling a pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: “Really I must buy a pencil,” as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest please of town life in winter–rambling the streets of London.”

Now look at what Woolf has focused her roving halogen beam on in the first two sentences? Continue reading →

Tags: essays, foxhunting, golfing, humor, moth, stream of consciousness, Virginia Woolf