first day of school

I started summer school today. I’m taking French 101. My teacher was speaking about 95% in French. It was intense.

An academic high to wind down the spring semester was another A on a paper! I wrote a letter to Katherine telling her why she should read Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I wrote a little bit about Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen, which turned out well for me before. Here’s an excerpt:

Clarissa Dalloway made the decision to marry Richard rather than Peter. To Peter, she is still idealized. He ponders,

There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost… She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known (Woolf 149-150).

Although Peter has found a new wife in Daisy, a woman from India, he still pines for Clarissa. She has a comfortable life of throwing parties and socializing, but she is not perfectly satisfied like the well-married women in Austen’s novels. Richard allows her independence; the two lead very separate lives. Clarissa’s character seems like one who would enjoy her independence, and she does, but her interactions with Peter again leave her worrying that she is just the “perfect hostess.”

I think that you and I can enrich ourselves and almost warn ourselves about our future by reading Mrs. Dalloway. We are at a point in our lives where we can go one way or another at a fork in the road—we are still single and have no commitment to specific careers right now. If there is a time to think about our futures and what they will look like based on decisions we make, this is it. Is it worth wondering what life could have been like with another person in order to be financially secure? How should we behave knowing that death is going to happen, not just for us, but all around us? What experiences can we have now, what opportunities can we take, to make us more aware of other peoples’ perspectives and all that the world has to offer? Getting into Mrs. Dalloway is a lot heavier than reading Sense and Sensibility, but its realistic nature has more to offer us in terms of affecting our lives.