It was good to wake up to a cloudy sky greeting me, as seen up above, at the end of this inner tenament shaft of mine, and to begin the day by re-reading this edited section from Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own".

Even though, Ms. Woolf talks about women making space, and claiming freedom in their lives to write, her diagnosis and prescriptions hold, I think, for anyone infected with this low grade fever of wanting to write. Some extracts:

"...for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare's plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in."

"...I am talking of the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals - and have £500 a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come..."

o, i love this book so much. i need to reread it again.

...you should read hermione lee's biography of woolf also. i will trade it in loan for the ondaatje....?