In Three Guineas, an essay that expands on her writing in A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf responds to a letter asking her to lend her support to the effort to prevent war. She is writing in 1937, a moment when war is less an abstract notion than an insistent neighbor, knocking loudly on the door. She considers, in light of other requests made to her, whether or not education is an antidote to war-making. But in consulting history on the matter, she is forced to conclude the opposite:
Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war?
Woolf, Three Guineas, page 193
Woolf writes of the refusal on the part of most university professors to teach at the women’s colleges, of the fact that the women’s colleges are beggarly compared to those of their brothers, that women are still largely precluded from entering the universities. That is, far from the open arms one might associate with an institution committed to generosity or magnanimity, the university seems to have the qualities of a locked door. What would become of women if they acquired the key?
And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war?
Woolf, Three Guineas, page 249
It is hard not to read this in light of the present-day assault on universities, of their effusive capitulation to an authoritarian power, of the huge sums of money that make paying such bribes possible—and of the wars being fought daily across our cities and streets. And, yes, on the one hand, the attack on higher education is a crime and a terrible loss, both for the students and professors, the researchers and scientists who are trampled in the process, and for humanity at large, who will no longer benefit from their great work. But so, too, is it a loss that education became so high, so much an enormous business, a place of credentials and prestige, of status and repute, grandeur and power. Anything that grows high must build up ramparts to defend itself, and where there is a wall there is—one day or another—a war.
“What is meant by ‘reality’?” asks Virginia Woolf:
It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us. So at least I infer from reading Lear or Emma or A la recherche du temps perdu. For the reading of these books seems to perform a curious couching operation on the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enmity with unreality; and those are the pitiable people who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not.
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 143
Unreality here is not the imaginary or the fantastical—for these are what emerge from a living and real mind—but the manufactured and manipulative mirages that draw us away from our creative powers, the noisy illusions made to drown out our own perceptions and visions, that make it impossible to hear ourselves think. Reality, then, is that which heightens our awareness, attunes our consciousness to the living world so that we may resonate with it, so that we may experience the world as bare of its covering and in all its great intensity and vividness. To make unreality an enemy is to welcome reality as compatriot and comrade, as fellow in arms against a vacuousness that threatens to consume us as we—unwitting collaborators—choose to consume it.
