by Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941)
War (June, 1940)
Language: English
This, I thought yesterday, may be my last walk . . . the war - our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation - has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings . . . Those familiar circumlocutions - those standards - which have for so many years given back an echo and so thickened my identity are all wide and wild as the desert now. I mean, there is no "autumn," no winter. We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . and then? I can't conceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.
Note: this is a prose text; the line breaks are arbitrary.
Authorship:
- by Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) [author's text not yet checked against a primary source]
Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):
- by Dominick Argento (1927 - 2019), "War (June, 1940)", from From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, no. 6. [ sung text checked 1 time]
Researcher for this page: Malcolm Wren [Guest Editor]
This text was added to the website: 2008-07-01
Line count: 9
Word count: 107