Virginia Woolf and Boring Habits by Ilana Simons

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(Parts of this blog entry first appeared on a blog called Literature & Life that I run at Barnes&Noble.com. Check out this ongoing conversation about how classic books change our daily lives).

You might love your job, house, and family, but the sound of your own voice might still sometimes bore you. That is: Life is good when we have a routine that works, but sticking to the routine has its own drawbacks: From time to time, I can feel deadeningly, or too much, like “myself.”

I do like my fixed routines--like the daily trip to the gym--but sometimes, lifting weights, I’m frustrated that another possible “me” isn’t living the life it could.

We are always allowing ourselves little escapes from the work-day “me.” Escapes come from the mild to the extreme: A midday cell-phone conversation is a mild form of self-escape; a book is a dependable, rich escape; so is a trip to a foreign country.

Virginia Woolf is my favorite dreamer and novelist—a woman who lived and wrote from 1882 to 1941. Woolf was someone who lived so thoroughly in her head that she also spent a lot of her time dreaming up ways to escape or expand it.

She wrote many strategies for self-escape in her famously delicious diary—in turn, her diary entries amount to a sort of tool-book for reworking outworn or deadening routines. Below are some entries I love, and some discussion. I’m wondering if you connect with any of these—or can add your own insights about the relationships between old routines and a satisfying life.

Diary Entry #1: On Sat March 8, 1941, Woolf was about to try a writing exercise in her usual writing voice, but she suddenly felt like she was being way too much the usual “Virginia”—and she punched herself, to get out of the familiar head: “No: I intend no introspection,” she wrote. She didn’t want to live in her all-too-familiar head; instead, “I mark Henry James’s sentence: Observe perpetually. Observe the oncoming of age. Observe greed. Observe my own despondency…. Suppose I bought a ticket at the Museum; biked in daily and read history. Suppose I selected one dominant figure in every age and wrote round and about. Occupation is essential. And now with some patience I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down…. Now to cook the haddock.”

I like this headspace. When Woolf writes “observe perpetually,” she’s talking about looking at the world with an open, rather than the habit-bound, mind. Just look, she screams at herself. She knows that too often, she takes comfort in her normal themes—in the political issues or topics or writing voice that are her own. Look, she says, “observe perpetually,” and try to shut down the familiar “Virginia.”

Her sister was a painter, so it’s neat to note that this advice is also what painters reportedly do when they want to paint realistically rather than in the stick-figures we learn in school. They try to see without seeing the object. If you want to portray a great chair, don’t paint a “chair” as you normally think of the word or object “chair”; instead, see color in abstract form: See light, dark, color, whatever, without the words you always use. “Observe,” as Woolf says, with fresh eyes. Lose habit; lose “I.”

Or: Is that impossible? You tell me.

Diary Entry #2: Wed September 8, 1920: “Oh vanity, vanity! how it grows on me – how I swear to crush it out – Learn French is the only think I can think of.”

If life starts to drag with routine, maybe you should take a class at the local college. Virginia would do this—pick up a new language, like Russian, just to give herself a new track to think on. The English Romantic poet Lord Byron actually did the same: Midway through his too-short life, he started to learn Albanian, just to give his brain something new and “craggy,” as he said, to attach to. Tough hobbies can rewire the ordinary self. I’d love to hear if you’ve experienced this need to find a strange and difficult hobby: What, when?

Last bit of Diary: Monday, October 25, 1920: “Melancholy diminishes as I write. Why then don’t I write it down oftener? Well, one’s vanity forbids. I want to appear a success even to myself. …I think too much of the whys and wherefores; too much of myself. I don’t like time to flap around me. Well then, work.”

Woolf called work the best solution to our negative headspaces. Freud said the same thing, at about the same time in history: A happy life, he said, is a life in which you feel free to 1. love and 2. work until you parade your highest capacities. Passion and confidence are keys to good living, he said.

Woolf thought work was a good opportunity for imagination. In work, we don’t think of “me” so much as we just look at the subject at hand, so we can enter an almost Zen-like state—where we’re working, but not overly conscious of the habits and ruts that make the “you,” on most days, so indelibly “you.”

What activity ever cures boredom for you? Or, do you feel no need for change; do you love consistency more than this?

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Ilana Simons, A Life of One's Own, Virginia Woolf, guide, biography, 20th century literature, human nature, boredom, fulfillment, women, psychology, Penguin Books, books