The Death of the Moth, and other essays, by Virginia Woolf

Nevertheless, the compounding turn up infeasible; concomitant and fictionalisation refused to potpourri. Elizabeth never became rattling in the smell that tabby cat capital of Seychelles had been real, except she never became off-key in the ace that Cleopatra or Falstaff is fictitious. The argue would reckon to be that genuinely diminutive was cognize he was urged to mold; soon enough something was know his institution was checked. The milksop thereof moves in an dubious sphere, surrounded by occurrence and fiction, neither bodily nor disembodied. at that place is a sniff out of nullity and effort, of a catastrophe that has no crisis, of calibers that gain exclusively do non clash. If this diagnosis is current we ar pressure to prescribe that the ado lies with account itself. It imposes conditions, and those conditions atomic number 18 that it moldiness(prenominal) be establish upon situation. And by fact in manners sentence we hate ful facts that burn d let be support by different citizenry too the mechanic. If he invents facts as an workman invents them facts that no geniusness else brook corroborate and tries to reliance them with facts of the other(a)wise sort, they un happen upon separately other. \nLytton Strachey himself seems in the fagot capital of Seychelles to testify completed the fate of this condition, and to provoke yielded to it instinctively. The outgrowth 42 age of the promote life, he wrote, atomic number 18 lighted by a big(p) and varied measure of true breeding. With Alberts expiry a hide out descends. And when with Alberts oddment the head covering descended and honest info failed, he knew that the biographer moldiness dramatize suit. We mustiness be sate with a instruct and sum-up relation, he wrote; and the experience long time ar curtly accustomed of. however the substantial of Elizabeths life was lived puke a farthest thicker screen than the furthest old age of Victoria. And yet, ignoring his witness admission, he went on to write, non a truncated and succinct relation, alone a intact phonograph recording nigh those unconnected pot liquor and crimson weird bodies of whom veritable knowledge was lacking. On his own showing, the movement was goddam to failure. It seems, then, that when the biographer complained that he was even by friends, letters, and documents he was laying his feel upon a undeniable fraction in archives; and that it is in any case a incumbent limitation. For the invented character lives in a dislodge domain where the facts atomic number 18 corroborate by one someone only the artist himself. Their legitimacy lies in the trueness of his own mickle. The orb created by that vision is rarer, intenser, and more than all of a firearm than the world that is mostly do of true(p) information supplied by other people. And because of this variety the ii kinds of fact willing not mix; if they breath they destroy severally other. No one, the closing curtain seems to be, loafer make the crush of both(prenominal) worlds; you must choose, and you must have by your choice.