A kind of Pythagorean terror.

In the last entry of her diary Virginia Woolf wrote:

"Everyone leaning against the wind, nipped & silenced. All pulp removed.

This windy corner. And Nessa is at Brighton, & I am imagining how it would be if we could infuse souls."

Four days later she walked into the River Ouse, her pockets full of stones, convinced that her work, her life, and her relationship with her sister Vanessa were irreparable failures. She believed she was again slipping away into the mental illness that had recurred throughout her life, and that she no longer had the strength to recover. She had saved herself several times already, it could be argued, and had been saved more often by the interventions of her husband, friends and family, and there is no telling why this time was different; maybe it was the threat of the German invasion of England, a very real threat in 1941, with serious implications for her own and her husband's well-being. She had completed the first revision of her last novel, Between the Acts, and at some point just after its completion she'd decided that the book was fundamentally flawed, and couldn't be fixed; she felt herself unable to write at all, telling her general practitioner, "I've lost all power over words, can't do a thing with them.", and maybe it was this loss of ability in the medium that had defined her life and brought her some feeling of independent success that she couldn't endure. She had begun to hear voices, she was sure she would become a burdensome invalid, and she must have thought she was doing what was best for everyone around her. The final letter she received from her sister might have convinced her this was so; this sister, her closest friend and ally, and at the same time her partner in a lifelong intellectual and emotional rivalry, writing to her that she must pull herself together in a time of great hardship for the whole country, and that she musn't create more worry to add to it.

She thanked her sister for this letter in the suicide note she left propped on her writing desk, and then she took a walk. And I haven't written this to praise, explain, or elegize what she did--it happens all the time, a person holding themselves up to the light and deciding that they can't cut something precious from the mess of inclusions they find, a ringing silence thickening the air to a bloodless, icy fist in which they're trapped. In a different context, earlier in her life, she had written, "I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in." The last hope of many, as it appeared to be hers, is to slip the bonds of the one life that feels so flawed from its very beginning and take on another, full in all the ways ours is found wanting, infinitely superior in its accomplishments and promise from the vantage-point of our own cramped, drafty corner. Virginia Woolf seemed to wish for this, appraising herself always in the light cast by her sister, whom she revered as a bountiful earth-mother, by her contemporaries in art and society, and by her predecessors.

We all do this. And if we do it enough these other lives crowd our own out of the picture entirely. We formulate a theory of the beautiful and worthy life using the examples laid out by others, and if we can't make an elegant proof of our own result from it, there is the fear that a life's work is lost. We're constantly running up against parts of ourselves that don't fit our view of what we should be, what we could have been, and the impossibility of reconciling the theory with the facts is often insupportable. This is the "Pythagorean terror" of Beckett's Three Dialogues; like Pythagoras, whose entire system of intellectual and spiritual belief was jeopardized by the discovery of irrational numbers, like Virginia Woolf, who said, "Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order" and couldn't support the loss of that ordering power, we can find ourselves left hollowed out and breathless as the foundations we've constructed are blown away.

I don't know the remedy for this, if there is one. I'm just as suceptible to this kind of terror as anyone else, and I've felt the products of my life, myself among them, to be a pale reflection of the creations of others who came before and did it better, and always not what they should have been. Even as I write this I feel it, and I'm reminded of so many others I know who are feeling it, and the killing punishments we dole out to ourselves, the mountains of work we've destroyed.

I'd like to find a way out of that corner where the light doesn't reach and we're "shadowed more and more darkly by a sense of invalidity, of inadequacy, of existence at the expense of all that it excludes, all that it blinds to." Maybe feeling around within that blindness for the outlines of a life where we can at least express that terror, understanding that there is little perfection to be found in any theory, is the best we can do.