“What he could do he did.”
Virginia Woolf is so good a writer — so intelligent, so responsive, so formidable — that it can be hard to make yourself read her. She’s like the three-and-a-half hour Best Foreign Language film that you scroll past on your way to rewatching The Sopranos. You do want to watch it but somehow never quite now.
There is, however, a side door into the estate of Woolf’s genius, and it’s considerably more inviting: the essays, journals, and letters. Here you get all the brilliance without any of the pomp and solemnity. These books are companions rather than sovereigns peering doubtfully down. No black tie is required.
My favorite of her essays is “The Death of the Moth.” It was published the year after Woolf’s death, and you read it with that heart-hushed sense of coming upon a still-warm and terribly significant relic: a dead dog’s leash hanging by the door; a birthday reminder for a buried friend. It’s a two-and-a-half-page epic disguised as an idle bit of indoor sightseeing.
E.L. Doctorow, describing how he came to write Ragtime, once said: “I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. That’s the kind of day we sometimes have, as writers.” As “The Death of the Moth” opens, Virginia Woolf appears to be having that kind of day herself.
“It was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window…”
She noodles — virtuosically — around, describing some birds (“…soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air…”). We think we can feel, in the benignant September air, a nap coming on.
And then the moth appears. Hay-colored, apparently contented (to the extent that moths can appear to be anything), he bumps along the windowpane.
“One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him… He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did.”
This, for me, is the moment when the essay turns. The monosyllabic, practically Taoist simplicity of that last sentence! It’s as if Woolf’s attention, in all its fineness, were a kind of polished ramp down which her consciousness has accidentally slid, ending up inside this poor and unworthy creature. She feels his predicament almost too acutely. The landscape she’s been dreamily describing — the downs, the sky, the far-off sea — are for him, and so now for her, like the whirling galaxies are for us: abstract beauties of an irrelevant scale. The windowpane is all.
And so when, a paragraph or two later, Woolf notices that the moth is struggling to get across the windowpane, it registers as very dire news indeed.
“After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped back from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly.”
And here Woolf does something strange and heartbreaking. She reaches out her pencil, intending to help him right himself. But before she can:
“… it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.”
The causal chain here is presented so matter-of-factly that its strangeness didn’t hit me until my third or fourth reading. She was all set to help the moth until (and here we give thanks that Woolf was not an EMT) she realized that it was dying.
In other words: death, for Woolf, is not the final boss in the video game of life, to be fended off with maximum vigor. It’s a kind of spectral rescue vehicle. She sets down her pencil in order to beckon the true bringer of relief. It feels facile to make too much of it, but how can I not mention it? She would, shortly after finishing this essay, walk into the ocean with rocks in her pockets.
In any event, death accepts her invitation.
“One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death.”
The moth’s legs flutter some more, and then they stop. The moth is dead. “The struggle was over.” Woolf even affords him a dignified final viewing: “The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed.”
But I prefer to remember him as he was a page or two earlier, bumping single-mindedly — perhaps zero-mindedly — around the corners of the windowpane. The proper expression of the life-energy with which he’d been endowed was to flutter — just as the proper expression of the life-energy with which Woolf had been endowed was to write. He fulfilled his life’s purpose (and how many moths have the sense to die in view of a genius?). What he could do he did.