Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

Previously, I posted about Pierrot and the Moon which I saw as one of two Theater thesis performances.

The other performance was called Virginia Woolf: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, a rather clever arrangement of characters in which the ghost of Virginia Woolf arrives at the New York Library where there's a display on her work set up - apparently in honor of the upcoming 125th anniversary of her birth in Jan '07. When I go to plays, I copy down lines I like in my notebook. One of the quotes (which I didn't quite copy in time, so forgot some of it) went something like All I have ever longed for is one expressive sentence that should signify all the glory ...
...All these journals, and I was never able to strike on such a phrase.

As further context, I'd like to reference this post, [link to be reinstated at a time TBA] which I actually made just before typing this one.

written in my notebook during intermission between the two performances:

***

This causes me to think that perhaps I should read more Virginia Woolf. I really don't have any experience with her writing. I also want such a sentence. I suppose we all do, but some of us don't have writing as our primary medium of interpretive expression. And then, I don't want to read her, for the same reason that I don't want to read xkcd sometimes - I want my creations to be my own - I want to write it myself! But a friend and I were talking about the problem of potentially never having an original thought. And reflecting on how much effort and energy it takes to advance to something that actually IS new to anyone other than myself, and also how I am sometimes frustrated with others for making mistakes or for coming upon something slower than they would have had they simply opted to read certain relevant things.

...

It's possible that it would be selfish for me to miserly insist on owning the things I think I'm creating rather than recognizing that my own thoughts are relatively unoriginal.

Maybe I should look around more for ways to step up off of the work of others, allowing myself to become less my own and more of others -
allowing the things I produce to be a collective work.

At least then,
I would be honest in my attempts to progress rather than fooling myself into thinking that I can, at my present stage, endeavor to create anything truly new

when all around me,
my same thoughts that I ignorantly transcribe here, are readily available in volumes & minds of others if I would only let them influence me in the same way that I hope my work can someday influence others.

I am feeling rather hypocritical at the moment.

***


Oh yes-

The end of the Virginia Woolf play contains such quotes (much quotage removed) as:

(reading from Moments of Being)
"behind the cotton wool,
there is hidden a pattern
and we are all parts of that pattern..."

... we are the thing itself

I can hold these words,
but I will never change them. Even if I were to destroy everything in the world,
they are the unchanging thing
and I have no posession of them.

...here is life
here are the words given us each alike,

and we must do our best with them.