The meaning of Life

To the Lighthouse ultimately demonstrates the inadequacy of clock time to measure human experience: life is not felt, Woolf shows, second by orderly second. Instead, one minute seems to drag on an eternity while the next two decades speed by. One is one second aware of a human lifespan as a long, luxurious stretch and the next second perceives it to be an infinitesimal fraction of Earth’s much more enduring existence. Memories return in the present and live on, sometimes seeming never to have passed.

Characters throughout To the Lighthouse question life’s ultimate meaning and supply different answers based on their own perspectives and on the circumstances that surround their questioning. Mrs. Ramsay understands the meaning of life to be family and domestic happiness, while Mr. Bankes and Mr. Tansley understand it to be work and professional success. Mr. Ramsay vacillates between these answers, finding ultimate meaning sometimes in family, sometimes in philosophy. Lily thinks life’s greatest meaning lies in making art.

Yet even as each character’s thoughts and behavior seem to present a loose argument for each “meaning,” no character ever feels personally confident or satisfied with one answer. Their moments of conviction are always shadowed by doubt. Thus, Mrs. Ramsay despairs at the start of dinner in The Window, feeling her marriage, her family, and her life are hollow and worthless. Thus, Mr. Ramsay continually doubts himself, one moment disparaging his family life, the next moment his professional life, and forever relying on Mrs. Ramsay for sympathy and praise to soothe his spirits. Thus, Mr. Tansley experiences bitter anguish and hurt at the dinner table, proving how much weight he actually gives to the very world of human relations he calls meaningless. Thus, Lily repeatedly turns on herself, belittling her life choices and criticizing her painting.

No matter where the characters of To the Lighthouse find meaning in their lives, those meanings are integrally related to the theme of Time. A character’s perspective on life is always affected by that character’s relationship to time. When characters feel that human action transcends mortality to endure the ages or when they are able to luxuriate in the present moment and feel the breadth of a human lifespan, then they are able to feel life is meaningful, worthwhile. Thus, reading Sir Walter Scott, Ramsay feels that the ongoing torch of human accomplishment passed from person to person is much more meaningful than the identity of each individual torch carrier. Thinking this way, he no longer worries about his own achievements and feels happy knowing that his work in philosophy will be carried on by other thinkers in the future. On the other hand, Mr. Bankes, on tasting Mrs. Ramsay’s beef dish at dinner, is finally grounded in the pleasure of the present moment and can thereby see the merit in domestic rituals he’d previously considered meaningless.

There is, ultimately, no one meaning of life and, instead of reaching for one, the novel shows that meaning is subjective, contingent upon circumstance and perspective. Each life, then, contains many “meanings,” which shift and change from year to year, from moment to moment.

The Nature of Interior Life

Written as a stream of consciousness, To the Lighthouse constantly investigates the contours and patterns of human thought through its form and style. While writing within the perspective of a single character, Woolf’s sentences leap back and forth between various impressions, memories, and emotions, formally illustrating the associative nature of an individual mind. Lofty thoughts stand on par with everyday ones. Mrs. Ramsay’s mind alone leaps between thoughts on the nature of compassion, the relationship between men and women, household budgeting, her children’s futures, the state of her society, and the state of the beef dish she’ll be serving at dinner. Emotions, too, flash quickly in and out so that Mrs. Ramsay’s indignation at Mr. Ramsay’s exclamation “damn you” is restored to admiration just a few seconds later when he offers to double-check on the weather he has so adamantly insisted will be poor. While capable of such quicksilver change, the mind is also capable of extended preservation, so that Mr. Tansley’s insult floats in Lily’s mind ten years later even after she’s forgotten who said it.

Over the course of the novel, Woolf is also constantly leaping back and forth between the minds of different characters. Though everyone’s mind shares an associative, eclectic tendency, individual minds are also distinguishable enough from one another that Woolf sometimes doesn’t even have to indicate that she’s leapt from one person’s perspective to another’s, as when the text jumps from Lily’s to Mrs. Ramsey’s mind at the end of dinner in The Window. Likewise, Mr. Ramsay’s stream of consciousness is immediately distinguishable from Mrs. Ramsay’s in its lack of particular, material detail (the flowers, stars, and other such quotidian beauties that Mrs. Ramsay laments his inability to notice). As it slides in and out of different characters’ minds, the novel’s figuration further suggests that the divide between internal and external life might not be so rigid after all. Repeating metaphors of the mind as a pool of water and as a beehive transform abstract, private thought into a concrete, shared element of the natural world.

Every aspect of the novel speaks to the diversity of interior life: the diversity of disparate thoughts within an individual stream of consciousness as well as the diversity of different thoughts and thought patterns that characterize different individuals’ streams of consciousness. Lily’s reflection towards novel’s end that in order to see Mrs. Ramsey clearly a person would need “fifty pairs of eyes” (since each of those pairs would have such different insights into her character) can be read as a description of the novel itself: written through many separate pairs of eyes to achieve the most complete possible vision.