Rising and Falling

Wotcher mates,

So to catch you all up, for yes it's been a while, I thought I'd give you guys somethin' spesh*.  Thus, here is a passage taken from my journal about events this past week:

"On Tuesday, we took a tour of the Globe Theater and the Bloomsbury district, and in so doing, paid homage to the gods of literature--Shakespeare, Woolf, Eliot, etc.  We heard the history of it all, too.  This was the theater district of the day, she said, where there was gambling and prostitution, for no one respected theater in those days.  In a moment, I questioned Shakespeare and his ability to overcome the restraints of little education—William, did you know your genius?  Had you seen the future?  We then continued on to Bloomsbury where many writers have lived and worked, Virginia included.  Their lives, so private and personal, were laid before us like a platter of food (and of course we ate them up!).  Did you know this writer was an alcoholic and that one a gambler?  Did you know Virginia did not have sex with her husband?  What did it mean for us to know all this?  Did these authors realize that the things they did in everyday life, each choice they made, acted as a nail in wood, a board in the frame, so that one day, even after they were no longer around, we would tour their lives as if they were the buildings themselves?  We would discover every nook, every secret place—no closet would be left unchecked.  The front door would be torn off the hinges.  And we would eat it up.  Rising and falling from the past to the present, I decided it didn’t matter to me who Virginia Woolf loved (or didn’t), or how Shakespeare spent his time in the infamous theater district, but rather that they had foresight and initiative enough to pave the way for those after them, for me.

a reconstruction of Shakespeare's Globe Theater

However, the most amazing experiencing (and most humbling, fulfilling, circular—I could go on!) has been the visit to Stonehenge.  Just as Virginia Woolf wrote in Mrs. Dalloway, 'the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames,' so too was my experience at Stonehenge, but maybe in a more phoenix-dying-and-being-reborn kind of way.  To see this place, which was toiled over for many hundreds of years, for the sake of those after them, was so singular.  They knew I would come there.  They knew I would see and understand.  My friend and I even joked that the real reason we weren’t allowed to go inside of Stonehenge was because in the center laid a wormhole which would take us somewhere else in time, and such a place should never be visited (so they say).  But it was at this site, this place of great encumbrance and uplifting, that I felt here while still feeling away.  Rising and falling, as it were.  This is all real."

"Stonehenge rocks."

oh hey

Again, sorry for the lack of updates, but I do hope to update more frequently from here on out!

Nox,

Kelsey

*special (for all our "mature" readers)