Stories: Ventures into Unknown Territory 39:70

Adrian Berg, R.A. (b. 1929)

The Lake, Kew Gardens, Summer, Night 1984

Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf 1919

Length:Four Pages
Genre/Movements: Impressionism and Postmodernism

Short Summary with No Spoilers

 The visitors to Kew Gardens are reminded, by the gardens beauty, of their past affairs and dips into the eddy of love.

Writers Note: 

A Great refleciton is written by the literate kitten.

I Wrote a Haiku about the progress of a big squishy slug that I witnessed in Ecola State Park, in Oregon.









Dad and I hike up-
through dewy laid state park-
grey slug crawls on moss


Woolf unpacks the essential idea that our struggles do not matter as much to the large natural world we live in.  Nature will proceed with or without our help.  She describes our circumstance in this quote:

In the oval flower bed the snail, whose shell had been stained red, blue, and yellow for the space of two minutes or so, now appeared to be moving very slightly in its shell, and next began to labour over the crumbs of loose earth which broke away and rolled down as it passed over them. It appeared to have a definite goal in front of it, differing in this respect from the singular high stepping angular green insect who attempted to cross in front of it, and waited for a second with its antennæ trembling as if in deliberation, and then stepped off as rapidly and strangely in the opposite direction. Brown cliffs with deep green lakes in the hollows, flat, blade-like trees that waved from root to tip, round boulders of grey stone, vast crumpled surfaces of a thin crackling texture­all these objects lay across the snail's progress between one stalk and another to his goal. Before he had decided whether to circumvent the arched tent of a dead leaf or to breast it there came past the bed the feet of other human beings.

Quote

"Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one's happiness, one's reality?

Tidbits

1. Virginia Woolf was born in London and her real name is Adeline Virginia Stephen.
2. She suffered from manic depression and finally committed suicide by drowning.
3. She helped form the Bloomsburry Group a collective of great writers  "generally modernist in outlook, were chiefly united by a strong reaction against the preceding Victorian Age. The group included, amongst others, writer E M Forster, biographer Lytton Strachey and painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant." BBC Four                      

   Read Kew Gardens Here