A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The distant orange sky seems to merge into a violet-grey as a thin isolating streak rebels against their integration. She sits by the window, her gaze fixed at the thin streak, waiting unconsciously for it to reach the ubiquitous vast blackness of the sky. On the table, in her front, the pages of the open book ruffle whenever a whiff of air passes through the window into her room. Her ears, accustomed to the soundless sound of the pages, hear a symphony of the words played upon the notes of the disquiet encompassing her mind while all else is still. Slowly, they begin assuming a shape and the empty spaces are filled in black with inherent thoughts emerging unbeaten on the surface. This surge of thoughts, even from the disquiet, accompanies a tranquility which appears only occasionally. It appears when she is all alone in her room and more so, when all alone in her mind, when her mind is not bothered by the clutter of crockery while preparing dinner or by the ruffle of drying clothes on a rainy day, when her lovely kids are asleep and her mind is not filled with their incessant questions about the butterflies. And then, when it does appear, each cell in her body strives to clasp it and make it stay there for longer than she can have the luxury of.


So, yes, while she does have an actual room of her own, the thoughts in her mind are not necessarily her own.


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