It was at the Orchard Garden that the thread started running again.
As I let my soul wander, a line came back, insisting: a sentence to write, born from conversations with L. and M. at The Punter, after they had offered me Cambridge the way one offers a secret.
They speak of lectures, rooms, early mornings on the river, libraries where you hold original editions, pages saturated with annotations. In M.’s voice, as she talks about ink, margins, the presences left in the paper, Virginia Woolf is the first to appear: the one who thought about reading and writing from the paths of a college, from the threshold of a library where her hand met a “no”.
From there A Room of One’s Own is born.
That day in Cambridge, the contrast quietly overlays what M. tells me: one woman once kept outside, another today at the heart of original texts, and between them these readings “De Profundis”, “1984”, “Women in Love” which go on working in us long after the book is closed.
Sitting in the Orchard Garden, I realise that these places, these voices, these texts are part of the material I work with every day: encounters, displacements, ways of inhabiting a space, of letting oneself be transformed.
Paying homage to Virginia Woolf here also means acknowledging that certain thoughts continue to open, afterwards, a whole range of things that become possible to say.
Since moving to England, other names have come forward, like a map to unfold: walking in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence through landscapes he filled with desire and matter, coming closer to the streets and pubs where the shadow of George Orwell was shaped before 1984, heading towards London, Ireland, the Yorkshire moors to let Wilde, Beckett and the Brontë sisters speak with their places. All the English influence I grew up with, music, voices, texts, take on a different relief here: not only in pages or on vinyl, but in these paths, houses and rivers where literature also offers a way of inhabiting the world.