Recently, I rediscovered my love for Virginia Woolf in a most unexpected way. It was halfway through a conversation about my philosophy behind managing project teams — nothing to do with literature necessarily, nor women in writing, for that matter — but I was searching for words to describe how people work best when driven by passion and given a capacity to flourish, and how this capacity is something that encompasses the physical and emotional. Like, good coffee, or a good environment to work (and be creative) in.
The physical aspect of our surroundings is something that has become easier and easier to forget. When we operate in the digital, it’s not until that there’s a power outage that we remember there is value to physical commodity; the simple act of being able to switch on a light (or a network router) is what facilitates the vast amount of things that we do online.
The views Virginia elegantly expressed in A Room of One’s Own are typically summarised by her own words in the opening paragraphs:
All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction [...]
While Virginia examines women and fiction, and barriers women have had to face to strive for equality in literature (amongst other things), I am sure I am not the first to extend this to the idea of being able to create in general, by anyone.
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom.
I must not have been long out of my teens when I read this essay, or perhaps, in my early twenties. Something about it has profoundly affected the way I saw the world and my place in it, yet it’s only recently that I realised how much literature shaped something quite as fundamental as how I go about my day job of getting people to work together.
We take for granted that our physical environment, the ability to know when the next meal comes from, are very things that free us to dream, therefore to create. But we also take for granted the shape of things that inspire us.
Over at More Intelligent Life, Megan Busker wrote about an exhibition of Woolf’s books and papers recently at the Grolier Club in New York.
This paragraph, in particular, caught my eye:
[...] During Woolf’s lifetime, the telephone had yet to eclipse letter-writing as the primary form of communication and e-mail hadn’t yet blanched such correspondence of its personal touches. Many of the items here are biographically richer than their contemporary equivalents. [...]
It makes me wonder, as we move on towards digital dreams — while I believe how the richness of books has served our present destinies would change and not die, and maybe something could be gained from the lack of flourish and drama — that we might not one day end up with a literary comparison of the post-modern and the baroque, and would look back one day in longing for cursive details and frivolous ornaments? What does this mean for how we will write?
