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Is this amazing book the archetype for present-day feminine TV Soap Operas..?

If you said that, I, and so many others who’ve been utterly charmed by Virginia Woolf’s disarmingly ‘unrehearsed�� slice-of-life prose in this incredible book, would take bitter umbrage!

No, this little book is MUCH more than that...

It’s a radiant hymn to the power of momentary, personal Epiphanies in our rapidly-moving, seemingly impersonal, and largely unconscious lives.

You know those magical Chicken-Soup-for-The-Soul moments when everything in our random lives suddenly - why? who knows! - makes SENSE?

Have you had those?

I think we all have, and a famous writer named James Joyce LIVED for them. From his earliest childhood on.

And they are the key to his densest novels.

Now, back in the early twentieth century, books by Mr. Joyce suddenly became scarce, for reasons that were perfectly clear to a precious few - but unknown to the hoi poloi (that’s US).

But Virginia Woolf could get ‘em. You see, her wonderful husband Leonard was a Publisher.

He founded the famed Hogarth Press. And he had continental publishing contacts, and thus clear access to the early classics of modern lit which back then were always so strangely out of stock in our world.

So when Leonard Woolf discovered the radical, stream-of-conscious world of Mr. Joyce, he let Virginia in on the secret.

And the rest - and Mrs. Dalloway - was history!

And NOW the English Speaking World, darkened by the inclement weather of European extremist politics, could see what the fuss over Mr. Joyce was REALLY about -

And it was simply this: the ordinary, isolated magical moments of simple people!

And that’s it.

And isn’t that what OUR life’s really about? Magic moments!

When I was in my Junior Year at University, I had a wonderful professor. She exuded such a simple radiance, a radiance that extended itself to every one of those modern novels in that endlessly fascinating course she taught - all of which she so loved, and wanted to share with her young students.

Now, hold on just a moment!

We’re talking MODERN novels? Those dark, twentieth-century explorations of the forbidden, hidden recesses of the fallen human psyche?

Writers like Joyce and Beckett? WHAT simple radiance do you mean to find in them?

OK, I’ll explain!

My prof was a bright- and starry-eyed scholar. Disabled from an early age, and a lifelong reader, she brought to her readings of these dark classics a joyful reverence, belonging to a human category few of us remember:

Unvarnished innocence!

So there I was - an impressionable kid in her class who had recently - and woefully - come of age, and could see in her something that rose far above my fellow hippie classmates, all of whom were living wildly for the day.

She had given me reason for rejoicing in the classics again - looking at them through her unspoiled, grateful eyes.

And I wanted to thank her for it.

For my final paper of the term I chose the subject ‘That Timeless Moment: The Epiphany in the Novels of Virginia Woolf.�� I poured my whole heart, soul and all the effort I could muster into it.

And she LOVED it.

Thanks, Mr. Joyce, Mrs. Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway - and dear Susan - for cutting through all of modern life’s oh-so-convenient dark obfuscations, paranoias and taboos -

To get us to the radiant HEART OF LIFE again.