Heaven in a Lead Pencil
Corpus Christi & Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting: A London Adventure
In the wake of the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Catholic Church is awake to the World beyond the world. Having given ourselves over to the adoration of the ‘Godhead… in hiding’ in the Blessed Sacrament, we are (hopefully!) alive to the luminous realities that linger behind the veil of mundane things.
Bread that was once just bread is so no longer. Wine that was once just wine is so no longer.
That Reality starts a shaking in the consciousness, and while the mystery of the Eucharist is completely unique, we realize that everything vibrates with this same reality in varying degrees. The world is not full of ‘just things’, it is full of things charged with being. It is full of signs and symbols directing us from the visible to the invisible that holds it all together.
Nothing is only what it appears, and certainly not as it appears to those with their eyes closed.
The Church calls this fact ‘sacramentality’ and declares with Gerard Manley Hopkins that “the world is charged with the Grandeur of God”[1], “for from him and through him and to him are all things.”[2] We live in a world governed by spiritual realities, hiding just beyond our sight, and everything we see, hear, smell, taste and touch is a reflection in varying levels of brightness of the One who created it all.
And Catholics are not the only ones who sense it.
In searching out a rich sacramentality in the literary world, you might not immediately think of the Modernists of the early 20th century. Cultural iconoclasts that they were, the destruction of signs and symbols seems more readily in their line. From the poets who did away with meter and rhyme (and sometimes words), to the novelists who ceased to write in complete sentences, traditional signs and symbols were more often targets of their ire and ‘revolutionary genius’ than a central theme (if any theme was permitted by the literary gods). But to imagine these artists as mere demolitions experts is to sell them short. In fact, after such a paragraph, I might understandably be accused of prejudice, even though early 20th century Modernism includes some of my favorite authors.
It is easy to place ourselves in ideological camps when looking at divisive work, especially work that had widespread impacts on the ways we view truth, meaning and human experience. When we think of the damage these perspectives have done not only to literary discourse and the integrity of literature itself, but even to the very foundations of language, it is hard not to suggest that what this period needed was a good bonfire, rather than the open hearth-fire that allowed the airing of some truly toxic ideas.
Having put ourselves squarely in these camps, however, we can become prone to dismissing the genuine beauty and genuine truth to be found in the tingling awareness that must be acknowledged in the works of those like D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf. Or poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.
And if we are paying attention, we detect in that awareness a distinct, transcendent air.
While Virginia Woolf is hardly representative of all Modernists—it is very hard to be ‘representative’ of a group that thrived on being so distinctly ‘individual’—she is recognized as one of Modernism’s forerunners, especially in experimental prose techniques. She is largely responsible for important leaps in the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique that moved from simple and predictable narrative structures to an attempt to evoke vivid experiences of subjective existence through strongly character-based points of view. She also happens to be the author of a delightful short story that perfectly alludes to my claim about sacramentality among the Modernists. Woolf was a poet, if not primarily in medium, then certainly in soul, and her 1930 story Street Haunting: A London Adventure paints a vivid picture of the way things carry more than just their mundanity.
“No one, perhaps,” she begins,
“has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.”
We do not, by and large, attach significant emotion to commonplace things, and to do so seems strange to the economic mind, which is precisely why Mrs. Woolf promptly expends five thousand odd words to ensure that we do just that. She does this by making use of an evening walk through the streets of 1920s London, a walk commenced with the intention of buying a lead pencil, and through it, charging that lead pencil with a host of glorious memories—bizarre characters, impressive city views, and ripe emotional encounters. By doing so, she makes us see that the lead pencil may be commonplace, but the human experience that went into purchasing it is far from it, and the memory that formed this experience is long and carries those impressions with it. She demonstrates this reality early on. Forgive the long quote, but the prose is too beautiful to cut short in this instance:
“[W]e sit surrounded by objects which perpetually express the oddity of our own temperaments and enforce the memories of our own experience. That bowl on the mantelpiece, for instance, was bought at Mantua on a windy day. We were leaving the shop when the sinister old woman plucked at our skirts and said she would find herself starving one of these days, but, "Take it!" she cried, and thrust the blue and white china bowl into our hands as if she never wanted to be reminded of her quixotic generosity. So, guiltily, but suspecting nevertheless how badly we had been fleeced, we carried it back to the little hotel where, in the middle of the night, the innkeeper quarrelled so violently with his wife that we all leant out into the courtyard to look, and saw the vines laced about among the pillars and the stars white in the sky. The moment was stabilized, stamped like a coin indelibly among a million that slipped by imperceptibly. There, too, was the melancholy Englishman, who rose among the coffee cups and the little iron tables and revealed the secrets of his soul--as travellers do. All this--Italy, the windy morning, the vines laced about the pillars, the Englishman and the secrets of his soul--rise up in a cloud from the china bowl on the mantelpiece. And there, as our eyes fall to the floor, is that brown stain on the carpet. Mr. Lloyd George made that. "The man's a devil!" said Mr. Cummings, putting the kettle down with which he was about to fill the teapot so that it burnt a brown ring on the carpet.”[3]
We see here that each of these objects carries with them the memories of the author’s experience. We do not live in a world of mere lead pencils, we live in a world of vibrant, colliding human experiences, overflowing with details so numerous, it makes us dizzy to think of it. Every object in the world could be filled with an entire trip to Italy and four different people, and that is only in one human mind. Think of the eight billion other human minds currently inhabiting the world. Think of the approximately one-hundred and seventeen billion supposed to have existed in recorded history.
“But,” you may argue, “Woolf does not see anything truly transcendent here, the objects may be charged, but they are charged with our own memories. They do not contain meaning, or signs of a life beyond, just the meaning we impose on them, they are charged with us, not with God.”
I won’t argue with you too strenuously. It is true that Woolf shied away from outright religious themes and did so knowingly, though for the curious there is a great deal beyond this work to suggest that Woolf was indeed reaching for something beyond herself. I think it is also true that the invisible realties she invokes here are the primary realities to her mind, rather than the visible ones. We live for those realities in things, not just for things themselves. She does an incredible job of showing that just at the tip of our fingers is a boundary that breaks into an infinity of higher, rational truths. They are truths for the soul, not just for the senses, and the respect Woolf has for them is plain in the final line of her story:
“And here--let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence--
is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.”
While Woolf stops short of the religious, she gives us a luminous experience of the spiritual as it exists within the complexity of the human being as a rational animal. This is the instinct of love, and is it not a love that could readily be extended to the Supreme Gift we have in the Blessed Sacrament? Is the Eucharist not the gateway to a myriad of spiritual wonders lying just beyond our senses in the same way that the joys of the city lie buried in this little lead pencil? Let us adore Him tenderly, receive Him with reverence, for He is the greatest spoil we have received from all the treasures of the Heavenly Kingdom, under the appearance of bread and wine, Our Lord: Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.
[1] God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1918.
[2] Romans 11:36
[3] Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Penguin Random House.
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