Rough Day

In Fiction and Addiction, the professor has made it clear that it's going to get heavier in subject matter. We've discussed the cycles of addictions, and the way people can get trapped in all sorts of things in a pretty terrifying way. We started with laudanum dropping, and ended up at how Freud thinks our dreams are manifestations of our wishes, and how that translates in our reading (even in scientifically, he was never very accurate). We've gone into PTSD, trauma, depression, mourning, loss-- tough class, is what I'm getting at.

Right now we're reading To the Lighthouse, which I'm absolutely loving and it's playing with my brain in all sorts of ways. He doesn't always go into the biographical information, because he doesn't want it clouding our analysis, but in this case he made an exception.

According to professor soul-suck (I actually like him a lot, I've just never had a professor that made me so enthusiastically joyless before) To the Lighthouse is Woolf's way of trying to write herself out of the spiraling depression she was trapped in, which makes it seem way more intimate now.

Taking that one step further, he read us the suicide note she left for her husband before she loaded her pockets with rocks and waded into a river. It's haunting.

Dearest, 

I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. 

I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
-V

It hits pretty close to home. Still trying to shake it off.