I Actually Went to the Lighthouse

I have beliefs about Mrs. Dalloway—that Clarissa Dalloway should have been the one to kill herself, for example. I have sometimes, picturing all the characters in black leotards, found myself laughing at the first 10 pages of The Waves. But I never have the sense, opening To the Lighthouse, that it could have been anything else. It begins with the weather, just like a real day. It rises to some occasion, wakes with the lark to meet the weekend—moves “with an indescribable air of expectation” because it is going to meet someone around the corner, and, with the shock of encounter you sometimes feel in reading, you find that it is you.