A Room of One’s Own

I’ve been a great admirer of Virginia Woolf since high school, but this is my first time reading this particular work, and I’m quite struck by it.  She has a way of communicating that is hard to match, and I would recommend A Room of One’s Own before any denser modern material in a basic women’s studies class.  I think that in the time we live in, it’s very easy to get accustomed and complacent and forget just how monumental the steps are that have been made in recent years for equality.  Women and men are not equal, that’s for sure, but it’s just amazing to think that I was so lucky as to be born in this shimmer of time where I can forget the long years of oppression and hopelessness for women and have not only a room of my own, but three, and on top of that not one degree but two, and one of those in law no less.  I’m sure Woolf would be very pleased indeed to learn that such things would be possible so soon after she wrote.  We haven’t conquered the realms of men, but we have entered them, and that’s saying a lot.

Middle Earth? Totally a real place.

I’ve been watching short bits of Fellowship of the Ring before bed, and I’ve just been struck by how much those films can just get me, even though I’ve seen them so many times and every time I put them in I think “is this really going to be worth it?”  I think the great thing about those films, though, is that they put such a deep, amazingly detailed literary universe in full colour, twelve hours of viewing, cinematic form.  The scenes I find myself getting really excited about are those that just barely hint at the significance of, for example, Aragorn’s lineage.  It’s funny to think that twelve hours of footage really just scratch the surface, but it’s true.  There’s something extremely rewarding about reading thousands of pages of material but then feeling like the keyholder to the legacy, the one who gets all the jokes.  It’s the same sort of feeling you get when you read the trilogy after having recently read the Silmarillion, when suddenly ever few words are pregnant with meaning.  I sound like a complete nerd, I know, but I wonder if any other author’s quite managed this, to the point of feeling real triumph every time you re-read.  Of course, if anyone knows of a comparable experience, please do let me know!  For now, I’m off to re-read.  Or, ooh!  Maybe I can finally get started with the Unfinished Tales.  *rubs hands together in nerdy glee*