y dice:
"For Virginia Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness—to envision a future she couldn’t see...
... That Virginia would have neglected to mention her brother’s death to Violet was strange; stranger still was the letter she sent two days after his death. This time, she did mention him, but her letter conveyed a shocking lie: “Thoby is as well as possible. We aren’t anxious.”
... y sigue: ... Twelve days: “He draws birds in bed.” After two weeks, Virginia slipped herself into the narrative: “We begin to flirt with our nurses, and call them ‘my woman’ and they knit pale blue ties which they promise him, if he’s good.”
... And when nearly a month had passed since her brother had died, Virginia was full of talk about what lay ahead: “He is really getting on well, and we talk of getting up, and going away, and the future.”
The future. From where I sit today and write, Virginia’s desire to leave behind a climate of illness, to get up and go away, to be transported to a future one can’t quite see—and which may not exist—feels familiar and intense. I want to get in my car and drive; sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I drive far enough, for long enough, I will have found my way not only into a different place but into a different time, released from today’s grief and dread. The fantasy is interwoven with worry: in our fond talk of what we’ll do after “all this” is over, are we, like Virginia, deceiving one another, and ourselves? Or might our dreams of escape make room for other possibilities, worlds we want to live in but can’t yet describe? Can desire be a way of knowing?"
...Something altered in her life when he died... “Thoby’s form looms behind—that queer ghost.” And yet, at the same time, he seems to lie ahead of her. She imagined him waiting for her, somewhere, at the end of her life: “I think of death sometimes as the end of an excursion which I went on when he died. As if I should come in & say well, here you are.”
