Dear Virginia

PalmI've been reading the for a week now Love letters Between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, in Mireia Vidal-Conte's translation. Reading the letters and diaries of the writers I admire has always seemed to me a dark pleasure. We go behind the scenes, we read the private papers that time uncovers, we penetrate an intimacy that does not belong to us. As if we were the confidants of an ancient secret or the hunters of a treasure we cannot grasp with both hands, reading these love letters, which intersperse excerpts from Virginia Woolf's diaries, we gain access to the singularities of one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century.

Virginia Woolf wrote: "Every book I read bubbles up in my head as if it were part of an article I want to write." Sometimes reading becomes an invitation to write. I remember the first time I read something by Woolf; it was during my university years and (inner) revolts; it was her Orlando. It seemed to me an act of profound freedom, showing a path for restless bodies to challenge the norms. Now, reading the letters, I find a call to free love, but it's a freedom unlike ours. Beyond the commercialization of bodies and loves, which are consumed and extinguished in a fleeting instant, the love letters Virginia and Vita write to each other are a eulogy to slowness, an exploration of the deep and diverse bonds of love that overflow the institution of marriage and dynamite it from its core.

The long waits between encounters, the difficulties in seeing each other, the travels, all fuel their dialogue with the world, a dialogue written in the language of lovers. They feel the world and interpret it for each other. Being a writer, like Woolf, means pulling two threads at once: that of words and that of life. She was a tireless reader of life and books, seeking to explore the contradictions and complexities of her time with a brilliant and sharp pen. Her letters and newspaper excerpts demonstrate even more clearly than her novels her capacity for contemplating life, her sensitivity for translating lived experience into literary words.

Proceedings of Freedom

She had to fight against the sexist view of her time, which made her create her own voice outside of the Academy. This break with the academic world is illuminating in the pages ofA camera of one's own. Virginia Woolf wished to practice reading and writing as acts of freedom and found an alternative path to academicism by delving into the forests of the essay. Understood in Montaigne's way, the essay does not shy away from an intimate gaze or the baggage of personal readings, but neither does it renounce rigor or responsibility. Thus, following in Montaigne's footsteps, she creates an immeasurable voice of her own. With metaphors and images, Woolf transmits her thought like an axe that does not need the cordiality of concepts.

Now that the common reading meetings at Espirafocs are getting underway again, these words from outside resonate intensely and closely, "do not leave me a path for those who wear wigs and gowns. Read me, read me yourselves." Woolf vindicates the importance of common reader, who reads for the love of reading, slowly, who judges with euphoria but also with severity. As common readers we participate in the aesthetic debate of our time. The commitment to the common reader And with the dissemination of knowledge about literature and reading, it spills out from every page of her work.

Virginia Woolf defends reading and writing not only as an aesthetic endeavor but as an ethical commitment. Her generation was impacted by the Great War and the threat of World War II. Woolf was convinced that through reading and writing, bridges to a better world could be built. "Literature is not divided into nations, there are no wars there." Literature, if we enter it without fear, through reading, through writing, will survive wars, it will save us from the abyss.

This writing would like to be a love letter to Virginia Woolf, dear Virginia, your thought has ignited so many clarifications, your words are the camera and the beacon, the starry night and the fathomless forest. You don't need our love, but it is inevitable.