I first read this book back in 2006, saw it again at the library recently and thought, quite correctly, that it’d be satisfying to re-read. The start of the first essay, “The Docks of London,” made me think a little of Proust: the magic of names, the magic of place names especially. Woolf writes that any ship leaving port “must have heard an irresistible call and come past the North Foreland and the Reculvers, and entered the narrow waters of the Port of London, sailed past the low banks of Gravesend and Northfleet and Tilbury, up Erith Reach and Barking Reach and Gallion’s Reach, past the gas works and the sewage works” to the Docks (p 7), and it’s like an incantation. It was particularly pleasing to read this essay in the morning on the G train, arcing over the Gowanus, looking out at a Brooklyn waterfront/industrial landscape, reading about Woolf’s experience of the London one. And Woolf’s writing about the city itself is perfect, bits like this:
As we come closer to the Tower Bridge the authority of the city begins to assert itself. The buildings thicken and heap themselves higher. The sky seems laden with heavier, purpler clouds. Domes swell; church spires, white with age, mingle with the tapering, pencil-shaped chimneys of factories. One hears the roar and the resonance of London itself. (p 10)
Pleasing, of course, too, to think of London as I read: to think of how Greenwich looks from across the river, how Oxford Street looks now as I read Woolf’s description of it in “Oxford Street Tide”:
But as one saunters towards the sunset—and what with artificial light and mounds of silk and gleaming omnibuses, a perpetual sunset seems to brood over the Marble Arch—the garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. It is like the pebbly bed of a river whose stones are for ever washed by a bright stream. Everything glitters and twinkles. (pp 16-17)
Woolf writes of the heaps of flowers for sale in the springtime, the silk in the shops, the streetcorner magicians with their paper flowers, the man selling tortoises, and it’s all exquisite. There is the everyday, these human details, and then there is the larger view: like the view from Parliament Hill, which Woolf describes like this:
One sees London as a whole—London crowded and ribbed and compact, with its dominant domes, its guardian cathedrals; its chimneys and spires; its cranes and gasometers; and the perpetual smoke which no spring or autumn ever blows away. London has lain there time out of mind scarring that stretch of earth deeper and deeper, making it more uneasy, lumped and tumultuous, branding it for ever with an indelible scar. (pp 28-29)
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