Taking the salt cellar

Early mornings are the best time for scanning the patient. I can lie in bed and go through what needs to be written, what needs to be moved where. Does this part need to go right at the beginning, or towards the end?

This reminded me of Lily Briscoe, the painter in To The Lighthouse, and her moment of epiphany in the middle of dinner.

In a flash she saw her picture and thought, Yes, I shall put the tree further in the middle; then I shall avoid that awkward space. That's what I shall do. That's what has been puzzling me. She took up the salt cellar and put it down again on a flower in pattern in the table-cloth, so as to remind herself to move the tree.

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927)


More than anything else, I think this novel is about the pleasures and problems of creation. It's a book about writing a book (the one that's being written), and the way memory and time works on the imagination.