Going Round Our Selves :: Personal Narrative Woolf Essays

Going Round Our Selves To tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand, is not easy. -Virginia Woolf, "Montaigne" It was the end of August. I was eight years old and my mom, dad, brother, uncle, and I had gathered on the front porch of our lakeside cottage in Indiana. All day a thunderstorm raged outside. The rain swept across the lake in sheets from the north, flooding the boathouse and drenching the sheets and towels my mother and I had hung on the clothesline the night before. My brother and I had gone through every board game in the house and worn out the deck of cards, so he told me we were going to play catch, snatched up a tennis ball, and headed from the porch into the main part of the house. I, four years his junior, followed. It is here, first, that I feel I must pause; for just now, in this event as I have begun to recount it, there seem to be numerous forces at work. The way in which I remember the beginnings of this incident, the method by which I have started to put it into words, speaks to the rain that drove my family and me into the house and onto the porch, to my brother who effortlessly coaxed me into one game of monopoly after another, to the ease with which I complied with his silent instructions to follow him into the house for a game of catch. My actions seem so driven by things and people external to me that recalling my eight-year-old self has surprised and startled, unsettled me. In allowing this sensation of shock to play through my mind, I am instantly drawn to Virginia Woolf's "A Sketch of the Past," her version of a memoir in which she brings the places she grew up in, the people she knew, and a handful of the experiences that shaped her over the course of her life back into existence for us to read, perhaps eventually to come to know and be shaped by ourselves. Woolf is interested in this shaping and molding, the malleability, the instabilities of human existence that drive our daily lives; and so she sets out to explore and examine the power and influence of the forces in the early, formative years of one's life. She writes that somehow into the space and time of one's childhood must be brought, too, the sense of movement and change.