Thoughts on { Lighthouse | Henry James / Ford Madox Ford / Charles Dickens / Virginia Woolf / Alfred de Musset / Toni Morrison / Graham Swift
Maud Lewis, Lighthouse, 1960
“She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!”
Henry James, Washington Square, 1880
“And it was a most remarkable, a most moving glance, as if for a moment a lighthouse had looked at me.”
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, 1915
“The meagre lighthouse all in white, haunting the seaboard, as if it were the ghost of an edifice that had once had colour and rotundity, dripped melancholy tears after its late buffeting by the waves.”
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, 1857
“The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye, that opened suddenly, and softly in the evening. Now— James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight.”
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 1927
“You’re like a lighthouse shining beside the sea of humanity, motionless: all you can see is your own reflection in the water. You’re alone, so you think it’s a vast, magnificent panorama. You haven’t sounded the depths. You simply believe in the beauty of God’s creation. But I have spent all this time in the water, diving deep into the howling ocean of life, deeper than anyone. While you were admiring the surface, I saw the shipwrecks, the drowned bodies, the monsters of the deep.”
Alfred De Musset, Lorenzaccio, 1834
“She needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.”
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon, 1977
“Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers – pity lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon.”
Graham Swift, Waterland, 1983
“It was as if she lived only on clear, salty air, and when the day came for her to pass away, she would probably do exactly that. Just take a step to one side. Dissolve into a north-westerly wind as it whirled around the lighthouse at North Point, then out across the sea.”
John Ajvide Lindqvist, Harbor, 2008
Also:
Days [ ) Navigation | Charles Simic, 1938-2023
Variations on a Lighthouse | Paintings by Ida O’Keeffe, 1931-32
