22 February 1926 – 28 February 1926

I am blown like an old flag by my novel. This one is To the Lighthouse. I think it is worth saying for my own interest that at last, at last, after that battle Jacob’s Room, that agony—all agony but the end—Mrs. Dalloway, I am now writing as fast and freely as I have written in the whole of my life; more so—20 times more so—than any novel yet. I think this is the proof that I was on the right path; and that what fruit hangs in my soul is to be reached there. Amusingly, I now invent theories that fertility and fluency are the things: I used to plead for a kind of close, terse effort. Anyhow this goes on all the morning: and I have the devil’s own work not to be flogging my brain all the afternoon. I live entirely in it, and come to the surface rather obscurely and am often unable to think what to say when we walk round the Square, which is bad I know. Perhaps it may be a good sign for the book though. Of course it is largely known to me: but all my books have been that. It is, I feel that I can float everything off now; and “everything” is rather a crowd and weight and confusion in the mind.

I think I shall initiate a new convention for this book—beginning each day on a new page—my habit in writing serious literature. Certainly I have room to waste a little paper in this year’s book. As for the soul; why did I say I would leave it out? I forget. And the truth is, one can’t write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle,* at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in. It slipped in this afternoon. I will write that I said, staring at the bison: answering L. absentmindedly: but what was I going to write? Mrs. Webb’s book has made me think a little what I could say of my own life. I read some of 1923 this morning, being headachy again, and taking a delicious draught of silence. But then there were causes in her life: prayer; principle. None in mine. Great excitability and search after something. Great content—almost always enjoying what I’m at, but with constant change of mood. I don’t think I’m ever bored. Sometimes a little stale; but I have a power of recovery—which I have tested; and am now testing for the 50th time. I have to husband my head still very carefully: but then, as I said to Leonard today, I enjoy epicurean ways of society; sipping and then shutting my eyes to taste. I enjoy almost everything. Yet I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life? Something one can lay hands on and say “This is it”? My depression is a harassed feeling. I’m looking: but that’s not it—that’s not it. What is it? And shall I die before I find it? Then (as I was walking through Russell Square last night) I see the mountains in the sky: the great clouds; and the moon which is risen over Persia; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is “it.” It is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory; achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; trotting along Russell Square with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. Who am I, what am I, and so on: these questions are always floating about in me: and then I bump against some exact fact—a letter, a person, and come to them again with a great sense of freshness. And so it goes on. But on this showing, which is true, I think, I do fairly frequently come upon this “it”; and then feel quite at rest.