"It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or we are old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.
And why, if this and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us-- why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love."
-Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room (1922)
[Note on the picture: This is a photograph taken of the Dreadnought Hoax, of which the Bloomsbury group was responsible. Virginia Woolf is the handsome bearded one on the far left.]
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