the complete shorter fiction of virginia woolf

“I hold the blank page headed Friday November Thirteenth to the light of that day. There seems to my eye some discrepancy between the two. There, outside is the day; as it happens, bluish, cloudy, still and fine. Here is the page; white, smooth. How am I to bring about a marriage between them? But let me try, with a pen, dipped in ink.” -Virginia Woolf

I thought it something that I should be reading this on my own Friday November Thirteenth. I’m in America, in the South, but the week has been full of what The Euro calls Proper Northern Weather. And by ‘Northern’ I mean , of course, the North as referred to by the M5 – The North of England.

I was inking in my own diary this afternoon, something I rarely do anymore. My last handwritten entry was over three months ago. I wrote about John Malkovich as The Great Buck Howard.
— — — —

Friday 13 Nov 2009: She stopped remembering today. Or yesterday, maybe. Maybe even before that, to be honest. But I didn’t know it then. I know it now. That she stopped remembering. Today. My lovely little grandma.

B.

Words on monitors, made of ones and zeros, never seem as real as those made from pen and ink or impressions on ribbon.