Enter Other Lives
Reading Emily Kopley’s essay – a cracking piece of writing – on the new five-volume edition of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I am moved by a particular entry she cites. It is from August 1937, shortly after Virginia’s nephew Julian Bell, an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War, had died when his vehicle was bombed in Fuencarral. He was 29. The entry reads: ‘A curiously physical sense; as if one had been living in another body, which is removed, & all that living is ended. As usual, the remedy is to enter other lives.’ Remarkable is not only the testimony to familiar closeness, showing that a statement such as ‘his life is mine’ can be verified experientially, but even more the indication of a remedy for grief. Sorrow tends to make us retreat into ourselves. No!, says Woolf. Instead it must open us up, extending our compassion. For her this process took place primarily in the realm of the imagination. The tragic end of her life shows that she was not able to live up to her counsel. That, however, does not invalidate it.
