Dr Oliver Shaw

‘A woman must have money and a room of one’s own if she is to write fiction,’ Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own.

I am reading this book, in my own room, with my own money–living with the dread of that, ashamed to say, because I would rather live in a van on the street and wash in the sea and not pay a landlord. But I’m faced with a similar problem to Virginia. I am not a woman and I don’t write fiction but I am a man and I do write non-fiction and I find myself needing the same thing as Virginia to write: a room of my own.

This morning I walked along the beach at 6am watching the clouds and sky go from darker to lighter blue. I notice the reflection of the sky, now pink, in the water covering the sand. And I knew–I didn’t know it then, I know it now after reading Virginia–this is important. That I was there to witness the picture that the reflection chose in that moment. And it was made more possible, this noticing, I knew, by having this room of my own.

In this work, A Room of One’s Own, Virginia talks about how walking can spark the imagination, as it had for me this morning; she is in London walking by ‘Oxbridge on a fine October Morning’–and by chance right now it is also a fine October morning–‘strolling through those collages past those ancient halls the roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts […] was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment’ (8).

This morning, when I walk, I settle down upon song lyrics, humming: he doesn’t have anything to fear, he doesn’t have anything to fear, anymore.

Walking on the sand, I saw a man alone in the water facing the horizon and a single gull came over his head. I saw people walking their dogs and being careful to make sure the dogs didn’t jump on me. I smiled at them. And yesterday morning, I met a woman walking her dog with the hugest smile, so we stopped and talked for a while. She told me her name but I tried to hard to remember it, so it’s gone.

‘But when I look back through these notes and critizise my own train of thought as I made them, I find that my motives were not altogether selfish. There runs through these comments and discursions the conviction – or is it the instinct? – that good books are desirable and that good writers, even if they show every variety of human depravity, are still good human beings’ (104).

So we sit around in these rooms paying for the space to write something, to say something about what we see. I use the we with conviction because to be a writer is terrifying. And I belong to them.

That’s it for now; I think I will continue this next week: Woolf, part 2.

Oliver Shaw. Mon 14 Oct 8:00 AM.