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.

In despair at a critical review, Virginia Woolf turned to her husband and asked,

Well, then, what should she do about such abuse? Pay no attention, get on with her work. And if she couldn’t work, what then? If such attacks upset her so that she couldn’t write—what then, Mongoose, what then? Then she should read until she could write again; that’s what books were for.

Nunez, Mitz, page 46

(“Mongoose” was the pet name Virginia used for Leonard; he called her “Mandrill.” Mitz is fiction, but it draws from the Woolf’s diaries and other contemporary sources and is, for my purposes, true enough. All prose is fiction, as Le Guin teaches us.)

Virginia, of course, knew well the ways that reading could summon us to our own wills. Here a similar note is echoed in a passage in A Room of One’s Own:

Nature seems, very oddly, to have provided us with an inner light by which to judge of the novelist’s integrity or disintegrity. Or perhaps it is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible. When one so exposes it and sees it come to life one exclaims in rapture, But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!

Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, page 94

This is one of the great joys of reading, and of reading novels in particular: that something in the novel resonates so deeply that you feel it vibrate down to your marrow, feel that spark of truth race across your veins. And that spark is, very often, a light by which we can write, the energy we need to put our own pen to paper, to evoke the fire that makes those premonitions visible, however darkly and briefly and tenuously.

And yet: sometimes the words do not come. In The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin writes:

As they say in Ekumenical School, when action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep.

Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness, page 42

Which is another way of saying, when you can’t write, read. When you can’t read, sleep.

In an effort to understand the then-present state of women in the workplace, Virginia Woolf goes looking to the newspapers, where she finds a number of letters and articles declaiming that women have too much liberty, that they are taking jobs that men could do, and that they are neglecting their domestic duties in the process. She finds an immediate parallel to those complaints in other events of the day:

There, in those quotations, is the egg of the very same work that we know under other names in other countries. There we have in embryo the creature, Dictator as we call him when he is Italian or German, who believes that he has the right whether given by God, Nature, sex or race is immaterial, to dictate to other human beings how they shall live; what they shall do. Let us quote again: “Homes are the real places of the women who are now compelling men to be idle. It is time the Government insisted upon giving work to more men, thus enabling them to marry the women they cannot now approach.” Place it beside another quotation: “There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women. Nature has done well to entrust the man with the care of his family and the nation. The woman’s world is her family, her husband, her children, and her home.” One is written in English, the other German. But where is the difference? Are they not both saying the same thing? Are they not both the voices of Dictators, whether they speak English or German, and are we not all agreed that the dictator when we meet him abroad is a very dangerous as well as a very ugly animal? And he is here among us, raising his ugly head, spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf, but in the heart of England. Is it not from this egg, to quote Mr Wells again, that “the practical obliteration of [our] freedom by Fascists or Nazis” will spring?

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 228

The first quotation is from the Daily Telegraph; the second is Hitler.

(I would draw comparisons to the present moment, but they seem to draw themselves.)

Woolf later concludes:

It suggests that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 364

That is, the tyranny of government is the tyranny of the workplace is the tyranny of the home. Each begets and creates the other. But perhaps that also suggests the reverse: pull the thread on one, and watch as they all come undone.

In the work against war, Woolf notes that women—unlike many of their brothers—have four great but perhaps misunderstood teachers:

And those teachers, biography indicates, obliquely, and indirectly, but emphatically and indisputably none the less, were poverty, chastity, derision, and—but what word covers “lack of rights and privileges?” Shall we press that old word “freedom” once more into service? “Freedom from unreal loyalties,” then, was the fourth of their teachers; that freedom from loyalty to old schools, old colleges, old churches, old ceremonies, old countries which all these women enjoyed, and which, to a great extent, we still enjoy by the law and custom of England. We have no time to coin new words, greatly though the language is in need of them. Let “freedom from unreal loyalties” then stand as the fourth great teacher of the daughters of educated men.

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 267

These are strange teachers. We may be forgiven for not seeing them as such when they’ve visited us. Woolf continues:

By poverty is meant enough to live upon: That is, you must earn enough to be independent of any other human being and to buy that modicum of health, leisure, knowledge and so on that is needed for the full development of body and mind. But no more. Not a penny more.

By chastity is meant that when you have made enough to live on by your profession you must refuse to sell your brain for the sake of money. That is you must cease to practice your profession, or practice it for the sake of research and experiment; or, if you are an artist, for the sake of the art; or give the knowledge acquired professionally to those who need it for nothing.

By derision—a bad word, but once again, the English language is much in need of new words—is meant that you must refuse all methods of advertising merit, and hold that ridicule, obscurity, and censure are preferable, for psychological reasons, to fame and praise. Directly badges, orders, or degrees are offered, fling them back in the giver’s face.

By freedom from unreal loyalties is meant that you must rid yourself of pride and nationality in the first place; also, of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride, and those unreal loyalties that spring from them. Directly the seducers come with their seductions to bribe you into captivity, tear up the parchments; refuse to fill up the forms.

Woolf, Three Guineas, page 270

Woolf is echoing what we already know of wealth, fame, and loyalty—namely, that they encourage possessiveness and defensiveness, that they drive us to the violent defense of prestige and power, and that on that road lies war. We see this possessiveness and defensiveness in the whingeing insecurity of the leaders declaiming DEI; in the boss who insists his workers flatter his every decision, however foolish and arbitrary; in the patriarch who demands obedience from his wife and children; in the man who beats his partner when she tries to leave. (The most dangerous time for a woman in an abusive relationship is always when she is trying to leave.) Woolf, again: “the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected…the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.”¹ If we are to prevent war in our public worlds, then we must also root it out in the private.

And we must root it out among ourselves. For we are no more immune to the appeal of tyranny than anyone else:

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

In naming these teachers, Woolf transforms a proscription into a refusal. The lack of wealth becomes the refusal of it; the lack of fame, of prestige, of authority becomes the rejection of all those ugly and pernicious forces. (The one benefit of living in an era in which we are bombarded with the lives of the super wealthy is we cannot even for one moment forget that they are deranged.) By claiming that lack as a refusal, we release ourselves from longing for that which we can never have; we end a ravenous hunger that could never be sated. For had we great rank and great wealth and all the rest, we would be as eager for war as the warmongers, as miserable and unhappy as the billionaires. Without, we can see war for the horror it is; we can use our time and attention to imagine other worlds, and other roads to get there.

I think these teachers go by other names—frugality, integrity, humility, and solidarity, to name a few. Like the best teachers, they ask a lot of us. Perhaps too much on some days; we may not always be able to hear them, especially through the din of the war drums and the noise of the platforms and the very real fear of precarity that screams ever so loudly in our ears. But I think perhaps that if we make an effort to listen, we will find that they still have much to teach us, that we still have much to learn.