April 13, 2008 1:57 AM,  Pioneering Over Four Epochs said...

I have found some of the writing of Woolf very stimulating and useful in my own writing. Here are two passages i wrote to illustrate my point: these passages come from my memoirs.-Ron Price, Tasmania
________________________
It seems to me that, in some respects, I am completely unable to write anything about much that is quintessential in life, nor will I ever be able. For, as Baha’u’llah writes, “myriads of mystic tongues find utterances in one speech and how many are the mysteries concealed in a single melody but, alas, there is no ear to hear nor heart to understand.”

The garment of words can only contain so much. There is much knowledge that can not be put into words like the content of many of the arts and sciences. Mysticism itself finds its origins in this notion. No sensible man will venture to express some of his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable. So much that is said and thought here is as potentially changeable as the wind which blows and the clouds which change their patterns in the sky from minute to minute and hour to hour. A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living, as Virginia Woolf once said.
____________________
In analysing my own poetry, I wrote(drawing on Woolf...)To read Price’s poetry, his notebooks, his autobiographical narrative, his essays and his letters is to shift constantly from his imaginative and intellectual life to the here and the now, a specific time and place in the microcosm or the macrocosm. He has a wonderful capacity, gift if you like, to not see dust, as Virginia Woolf puts it, to be quite removed from the day-to-day trivia of life, as his wife might have put it-and often did. The rare joys of reality are juxtaposed with the endless elements of that trivia, the endlessly prosaic. Perhaps the reason he was a poet, at least in the 1990s, was that he could not stop. For him, writing poetry was a form of self-knowing, a form of risk-taking where he exposed himself. This process, though, helped him to define himself as a writer, as it did dear Virginia until she took her life in 1941. -Ron Price with thanks to Marlene Kadar, editor, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1992.