To resist and to yield
"For nothing is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture as nothing else can."
- Orlando, Virginia Woolf
Oh, Orlando – gender bending, military uniforms, Elizabethan dresses, and, apparently, a bit of dominance and submission. Yield is one of my favourite words ever.
(Apparently, the book is based on the life of Virginia's lover Vita Sackville-West; as she wrote to Vita in 1927, "its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind... there’s the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell." Mmm.)
Apparently, I've been reading all the wrong books. Thanks for the tip!
ReplyDeleteWoolf is designed to be read aloud. If you and Mr Haze ever read to each other, that's how you should discover Woolf. Her novels are prose poems: they come alive when the music and meter of them is spoken aloud, rather than just in the head :)
ReplyDeleteI have been readint the wrong books as well.. Definitely one to check out and read to my Ari.. He would love it..
ReplyDeleteAlmost the best final line of a novel I've read...
ReplyDeleteDepressive, frequently tiresome and far too feminist but, just occasionally, sublime.
Great film adaptation if you can find it too. The apple seller in the ice always breaks my heart.
I love the film adaptation - absolutely stunning cinematography, and Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I was a stroke of genius.
ReplyDeleteTilda Swinton doesn't manage to be very androgynous, but that just makes the first half of the story look like girl-on-girl action, which is absolutely fine by me ;)