WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.380 align:middle line:90% 00:00:03.380 --> 00:00:09.470 align:middle line:84% In my personal, self-absorbing despair, 00:00:09.470 --> 00:00:12.140 align:middle line:84% it occurred to me, being a student of literature, 00:00:12.140 --> 00:00:15.152 align:middle line:84% that I could look at the greats and see 00:00:15.152 --> 00:00:16.444 align:middle line:90% what went wrong in their lives. 00:00:16.444 --> 00:00:21.100 align:middle line:90% 00:00:21.100 --> 00:00:24.070 align:middle line:84% "Our sister's thrown from the back of a pickup into a grave. 00:00:24.070 --> 00:00:25.870 align:middle line:90% Our grandmother loses her mind. 00:00:25.870 --> 00:00:26.830 align:middle line:90% We are Chinese. 00:00:26.830 --> 00:00:27.700 align:middle line:90% We are German. 00:00:27.700 --> 00:00:29.110 align:middle line:90% We are American. 00:00:29.110 --> 00:00:30.670 align:middle line:90% Our brother's in prison. 00:00:30.670 --> 00:00:33.070 align:middle line:84% Our mother cries in a mental pavilion. 00:00:33.070 --> 00:00:36.070 align:middle line:84% Virginia Woolf is homosexual and it drives her crazy enough 00:00:36.070 --> 00:00:37.090 align:middle line:90% to kill herself. 00:00:37.090 --> 00:00:39.820 align:middle line:84% This is what I think, but I'm in an altered state. 00:00:39.820 --> 00:00:42.700 align:middle line:84% I enter a palace of pearls as my brother enters a banking 00:00:42.700 --> 00:00:45.740 align:middle line:84% institution, both doors are made of water. 00:00:45.740 --> 00:00:46.720 align:middle line:90% We are water. 00:00:46.720 --> 00:00:47.800 align:middle line:90% We are deaf. 00:00:47.800 --> 00:00:49.040 align:middle line:90% We are in prison. 00:00:49.040 --> 00:00:50.410 align:middle line:90% We are mental patients. 00:00:50.410 --> 00:00:52.180 align:middle line:90% We are liquid jewels. 00:00:52.180 --> 00:00:54.640 align:middle line:84% We house the liquid jewels in our pockets and walk 00:00:54.640 --> 00:00:57.310 align:middle line:84% into the river Ouse near Rodmell in Sussex, 00:00:57.310 --> 00:01:01.720 align:middle line:84% perhaps because we cannot make love to anyone we want. 00:01:01.720 --> 00:01:04.900 align:middle line:84% Virginia Woolf's mother dies when Virginia is 13. 00:01:04.900 --> 00:01:07.420 align:middle line:84% Stella, her half-sister, dies two years later. 00:01:07.420 --> 00:01:10.930 align:middle line:84% Leslie, her father, suffers and dies a slow death from cancer. 00:01:10.930 --> 00:01:13.360 align:middle line:84% Her brother Toby dies when she's 24. 00:01:13.360 --> 00:01:16.270 align:middle line:84% She has her first prolonged mental breakdown. 00:01:16.270 --> 00:01:20.020 align:middle line:84% If instead of winter, summer followed autumn, 00:01:20.020 --> 00:01:23.530 align:middle line:84% the journey of awakening would be a fantasy, as fantastic 00:01:23.530 --> 00:01:25.810 align:middle line:84% as Woolf's transforming of Orlando 00:01:25.810 --> 00:01:28.690 align:middle line:84% in a novel from a man in the Elizabethan court 00:01:28.690 --> 00:01:31.030 align:middle line:90% to a woman of 1928. 00:01:31.030 --> 00:01:34.600 align:middle line:84% The wilder the weather, the more ravens love it. 00:01:34.600 --> 00:01:38.080 align:middle line:84% If instead of having an affair with Vita Sackville-West, 00:01:38.080 --> 00:01:40.300 align:middle line:90% devoted wife to Harold Nicolson. 00:01:40.300 --> 00:01:42.700 align:middle line:84% Virginia could have had her for a lifetime. 00:01:42.700 --> 00:01:46.690 align:middle line:84% And had Leonard, her husband, and Harold, Vita's husband, 00:01:46.690 --> 00:01:50.750 align:middle line:84% taken others in marriage, would Virginia have lived longer? 00:01:50.750 --> 00:01:51.910 align:middle line:90% Happier? 00:01:51.910 --> 00:01:54.970 align:middle line:84% If instead of rain and gloom, the English countryside 00:01:54.970 --> 00:01:57.400 align:middle line:84% were warm, would she have been too frightened 00:01:57.400 --> 00:01:59.380 align:middle line:90% to make love to a woman? 00:01:59.380 --> 00:02:01.840 align:middle line:84% If the English countryside were brighter, 00:02:01.840 --> 00:02:04.390 align:middle line:84% would she have had a woman forever? 00:02:04.390 --> 00:02:08.400 align:middle line:84% The more conjecture in the wind, the more wind. 00:02:08.400 --> 00:02:12.090 align:middle line:84% Let us never be too frightened to make love to anyone. 00:02:12.090 --> 00:02:15.000 align:middle line:84% After her final attack of mental illness, 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:17.910 align:middle line:84% as scavengers had researched, and I repeat, please, 00:02:17.910 --> 00:02:21.270 align:middle line:84% not to sensationalize, but rather to prevent anyone else 00:02:21.270 --> 00:02:23.670 align:middle line:84% from nervous breakdown, Virginia Woolf 00:02:23.670 --> 00:02:25.950 align:middle line:84% loads her pockets with stones and drowns herself 00:02:25.950 --> 00:02:29.490 align:middle line:84% in the river Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28th just 00:02:29.490 --> 00:02:31.420 align:middle line:90% before spring. 00:02:31.420 --> 00:02:34.090 align:middle line:84% 'We couldn't have gone on discussing the nature of beauty 00:02:34.090 --> 00:02:38.400 align:middle line:84% in the abstract forever,' she writes in Moments of Being. 00:02:38.400 --> 00:02:39.510 align:middle line:90% We are water. 00:02:39.510 --> 00:02:40.860 align:middle line:90% We are alone. 00:02:40.860 --> 00:02:42.180 align:middle line:90% We are a moment of being. 00:02:42.180 --> 00:02:44.160 align:middle line:84% We are introspective and anxious. 00:02:44.160 --> 00:02:45.990 align:middle line:90% We're mysterious and honest. 00:02:45.990 --> 00:02:46.980 align:middle line:90% We are groans. 00:02:46.980 --> 00:02:48.060 align:middle line:90% We are salty. 00:02:48.060 --> 00:02:49.170 align:middle line:90% We are winter. 00:02:49.170 --> 00:02:50.910 align:middle line:90% Blackwater." 00:02:50.910 --> 00:02:53.030 align:middle line:90% "Midnight in England."