Woolf Versus Buddha

Virginia Woolf, in To the Lighthouse, shows thoughts unfolding in real time. That’s an astonishing feat, because thoughts, unlike feet, never stay still.

HOBOKEN, JUNE 8, 2025. At this moment, my feet are resting calmly on the couch before me. I can draw them at my leisure, glancing from feet to sketchpad. But imagine if, as soon as I looked at my feet, they flipflopped furiously, darted around the room, morphed into hands or ears.

That’s kind of what happens if I try to describe my thoughts. Thoughts don’t sit still long enough for me to observe them, let alone render them into words. As soon as I turn my attention to them, they become thoughts about thoughts, or meta-thoughts, which instantly shapeshift too.

Depicting thoughts unfolding moment by moment in real time is hard. It requires artistry and imagination. If a novelist pulls it off, readers recognize thoughts they didn’t even know they had. They think, Yeah, that’s it, that’s how I think!

For years my friend Lisa, when I yammered about Joyce’s talent for dunking us in streams of consciousness, urged me to check out Woolf. I finally gave To the Lighthouse a shot and fell under Woolf’s spell. Yeah, I thought over and over, that’s how I think!

Nothing much happens in Lighthouse. A few characters die, one shredded by a bomb in World War I, but off-stage. The novel is set on an island off the coast of Scotland. The Ramsays, an aging English couple, have a house there, where they spend summers with their eight kids and a few friends.

One brouhaha concerns whether the kids should sail to a local lighthouse tomorrow. Mrs. Ramsay says yes, Mr. Ramsay no, he foresees bad weather. A spot of tension ensues. At the end of the novel, Mr. Ramsey and a few others finally sail it to the lighthouse while Lily, back at the house, tries to finish a painting. That’s pretty much it.

The real action takes place in characters’ heads. Woolf flits back and forth between the psyches of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their kids, their artsy-fartsy friends. Woolf isn’t as intent as Joyce on depicting thoughts in their rawest form, stripped of context. Her prose is more straightforward, less in need of decoding than Joyce’s, and yet her vision of our inner lives is just as revelatory.

Brains pump thoughts as ceaselessly as hearts pump blood but much less predictably, as if in perpetual fibrillation. Woolf zooms in on thoughts to show their jagged, fractal jumpiness. At high resolutions, joy yields rapidly to the blahs, self-congratulation to self-loathing, affection to annoyance.

Epiphanies and banalities, the petty and profound, come jumbled together. Somehow this internal chaos resolves when you zoom out into a seemingly stable personality: serene Mrs. Ramsay, stern Mr. Ramsay.

Woolf zeros in on thoughts her characters can barely intuit, let alone express. Now and then Mrs. Ramsay, out of the blue, feels contempt or indifference toward Mr. Ramsay. She squelches these feelings the instant they arise. She loves her husband!

When Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay retire to their bedroom at the end of a long day, Woolf shuttles between them, revealing their unspoken grievances and yearnings. Mrs. Ramsay knows her husband wants her to assure him she loves him, but she can’t bring herself to do that. It’s a devastating portrayal of a good marriage.

Woolf lays bare the narcissism and neediness of her characters, especially the men. She can be gently teasing, but she never stoops to mockery or satire. She’s fond of her fellow humans, even Charles Tansley, who declares that women can’t write or paint and yet craves female admiration.

Death and solitude are coiled meta-themes. Mr. Ramsay keeps muttering a line from Cowper: “We perished, each alone.” Your heart breaks for these doomed, lonely souls, so trapped within themselves, so isolated from each other. They can only dimly intuit the void that divides them, and awaits them. But the uncannily empathetic Woolf, hovering ghost-like above the scene, sees that void all too clearly.

You can’t read Lighthouse without recalling Woolf’s struggles with depression, which culminated in her self-drowning. Woolf was exquisitely sensitive not only to her own inner turmoil but also to that of others. That’s why she imagines the thoughts of men, women and children so persuasively. Life supplied her imagination with plenty of grist.

I keep wondering how Buddha would react to Woolf. He’d praise her, surely, for depicting so eloquently our psychic restlessness. This, Buddha would say, nodding sagely, is monkey mind, which we should strive to transcend through meditation and other mind-calming practices.

If we’re lucky, we’ll become enlightened. The boundaries between us and others will vanish, as will our solitude and fear of death. We’ll wallow in blissful oneness. Wouldn’t that be nice.

Woolf is as much a mystic as Buddha. A mystic is someone who looks at life squarely, unflinchingly, who sees it in all its horror, beauty and strangeness, against the backdrop of eternity.

In Lighthouse, Woolf isn’t diagnosing a condition curable with mindfulness or ketamine. Nor is she projecting her melancholy onto the world. She’s showing us what it’s like to be an ordinary human being on an ordinary day. Life isn’t easy, if you’re paying attention, but it has its moments.

Buddha offers salvation, but I don’t really believe in that anymore. I’ll settle for the consolations of art made by a fellow mortal. Woolf gives me the sense I’m seeing more clearly, she makes me feel less alone. What more can you ask of an artist?

Lighthouse reminds me of a line in Marianne Moore’s poem What Are Years?:

He

sees deep and is glad, who

accedes to mortality

and in his imprisonment rises

upon himself as

the sea in a chasm, struggling to be

free and unable to be,

in its surrendering

finds its continuing.

I email my friend Lisa, who has been urging me to read Woolf all these years, to tell her how much I love To the Lighthouse. Lisa replies: “You have no idea how gratifying that is to hear. I can’t wait to see you at the beach to talk about it!!!!!”

Postscript: After reading this column, Lisa emailed me: "It would take me forever to write a comment on your riff that satisfied me (I tried but gave up) so I will save my response for the beach. One thing – you made me go back and read the Cowper poem [which has the line "perished.. alone" line cited by Mr. Ramsay]. That was a fascinating choice for Woolf to make (though I guess it could be one of the bits her father Leslie Stephen wandered around reciting – I gather he really did that).  I always imagined Ramsay in the scenes on the lawn as oppressively self-dramatizing and ridiculous but maybe she, who suffered so much mental agony, sympathized, too.  Speaking of sympathizing with Ramsay, don’t you love the part where Lily, having failed to respond to Ramsay’s blatant neediness, suddenly feels a rush of sympathy when he starts rhapsodizing on his beautiful boots? Woolf’s metaphors are so perfect – funny and poignant. A friend read your riff and sent me the article linked to below.  I know a ton has been written about Woolf’s mental illness, but I thought it was interesting. https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/it-s-important-to-listen-to-imaginary-voices-just-ask-virginia-woolf-a7545096.html

Further Reading:

For more riffs on literature, see I Read Gravity’s Rainbow So You Don’t Have To, Is David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” Really, Like, Great?, My Bloomsday Tribute to James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever, Henry James, The Ambassadors and the Dithering Hero, The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind, Free Will, War and the Tolstoy Paradox, Moby Dick and Hawking’s “Ultimate Theory”, Jack London, Liberal Arts and the Dream of Total Knowledge.

I take a shot at stream-of-consciousness writing in my quasi-fictional memoir Pay Attention: Sex, Death, and Science.