To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

I confess that I found the jumpy streams of consciousness a wee bit confusing but the jumpiness is indeed very human and very much like our own jumpy, paradoxical and inconsistent streams of consciousness.  This is very much the brain chatter that Jill Bolte Taylor talks about in My Stroke of Insight!  How do we reconcile the paradoxes and insecurities of our mind?  Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay seem to take opposite approaches.  The former relies on his intellect, ignoring much of his emotions and the latter seem to place most of her emphasis on her emotions rather than her intellect.  Of course, emotion and intellect are not dichotomies either, rather they are part of a whole, of a continuum.  Life is transient - how do we mitigate the impermanence of life?  I do agree with Mrs. Ramsay approach in that we should make the most out of the present moment but we can do this utilizing both our intellect and emotion.  A balance of both is not impossible to attain.  We can cultivate meaningful social relationships, as is crucial to the happiness and survival of our species while cultivating our intellectual mind at the same time.  I would not want the life of Mr. Ramsay in which he is so obsessed with his intellectual life that he in essence does not enjoy the company of his loved ones and seem to miss out on the lives of his own children and wife for the most part.

Mrs. Ramsays dies in the novel as do some other characters.  They die as a blurb in parentheses.  Death is a fact of life.  But so what?  Why would anyone want to live forever, be it literally or metaphorically?  Sure, it would be great if one is able to leave a great legacy of work to humanity but few of us can achieve the latter which seems to have tormented Mr. Ramsay unnecessarily. Should the lived moments not count the most rather than what you can leave behind long after you are dead?  Mrs. Ramsays is remembered well after her death.  Relationships and the summer house seem to decay after her death.  All this is also transient.  She may be remembered by Lily but as time passes, Lily will die and eventually Mrs. Ramsay and others will be forgotten by the living.  So what?  It's not like Mrs. Ramsays will know any better. She is dead.  Why are we, as a species so concerned which after-death?  Is it not more fruitful to pay attention to the living?  There is no one way of living that is right for all.  What is meaningful to me may not be meaningful to another.  It is our responsibility to make life meaningful for ourselves and to live in harmony with others.