I seem to have spent a few days reading and reacting to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. It’s my third reading now. First thing. Four fifty-minute chunks. As I re-read it and my notes, I respond to it, and my notes, and I (re)write.
What to make of her description of a rather unsuccessful morning in the British Library, where all she finds is men writing about women? Obsessed it seems. She’s angry.
But then she goes for lunch.
A nice lunch. She has coffee too. And find a newspaper. To pay, she reaches into her purse. Five shillings and ninepence. Her purse produces 10 shilling notes. Her Aunt died, giving her 500 pounds a year. In perpetuity. (It was only 2500 pounds, in total, in reality.)
That’s 39.10 CAD for a lunch! A good lunch. Expensive, I imagine? How can she afford it?
Her aunt’s money. She doesn’t have to work.
It hits me in a flash.
When I was a student, I had no money, but I did have some. Not like my students today. I had scholarships and loans and easy student jobs.
First year, I lived with friends.
Later, I parlayed them into cheap rent and cheap food through global arbitrage. (I was a librarian, making minimum wage, in Ontario, working in Ecuador.)
I lived frugally, but rent and wine and food in Spain 2002 and Ecuador in 2005 were far cheaper than in Ontario.
Rent in Colombia as a graduate student doing ethnographic fieldwork, when I spent my days walking, thinking, eating good food, and reading, was something else. Less still, when I went the gold mines.
That fieldwork was funded by the Canadian taxpayer and Carleton University. To great expense. It was decent money. And, my accidental exercise in global arbitrage, made my purchasing power much higher.
Not deliberately, but accidentally. I moved where my money went further, and the scholarship and grants allowed me to spend two years wandering around Bogotá and the Chocó and letting my mind wander and writing.
(When the purse ended, I experienced the opposite. Moving to Yale, with a shrinking scholarship as the Canadian dollar collapsed.) I walked, and wrote, but was far more stressed about money. Anxious. I spent those three years trying to find a job. Which I did. Then, a decade worrying about money as one salary only goes so far.
But then, and maybe now again as Mercedes works, I have the equivalent for lunches.
(I used to go to the library, then walk and spend 40,000 pesos on a lunch in Bogotá now. That is one day’s minimum wage.)
But, for the last decade, my phone would have been in the way. Making the mind wandering impossible.
But, not as as student. As a student, I had no phone. So, many times, I did what Woolf describes—the thinking and daydreaming and writing and letting the mind wander and making connections. It’s this that Woolf’s famous essay is an exercise in. (It does it by showing, not telling.)
It’s fiction, to be sure. But there is an element of autobiography. What about calling it a fictionalized auto-ethnographic account of writing? The day dreaming by the river, the flash of insight lost by walking on turf, the lunch, and a walking into the evening thinking about the gold that went into the college, and a walk to the library and then the next day at the British Museum and then lunch paid for by her Aunt’s inheritance.
I think it is.
But, of course, she had no iPhone, computer, or Internet. Has all of this connection robbed us of our ability to let our mind wander and make connections?
Yes.
But, need it?
No.
Zadie Smith, an other famous English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer, doesn’t have a phone.
These two facts might be connected.
