Taking a Deeper Dive

Woolf explores Clarissa's regrets about the past in terms of the choices she made concerning the people in her life, Richard, Peter Walsh, and Sally Seton. Woolf's term for these regrets is more accurately described as Clarissa's consideration of the alternatives. Clarissa recalls Sally’s devil-may-care attitude toward convention. She had a capacity for being completely honest and completely uninhibited. Sally wanted Clarissa to be the same. They shared a passion that Clarissa described as "the strange wild reverie" she experienced with Sally in the garden. While Clarissa knew that Peter desired the same complete and honest love that Sally wanted of her, Clarissa was frightened of the lack of control that complete honesty would bring to her life. Clarissa said that she loved both Peter and Sally equally. But Sally and Peter represented different concepts of being completely open and honest to Clarissa. Sally wanted Clarissa to give up her independence; Peter wante...

  "The Mezzanine" reads like a blog because of the specific, confusing double nature blogs have: it feels intensely personal and unfinished, like you're catching someone's raw thoughts, while also being clearly composed for an audience. Howie's mind wanders through escalators, shoelaces, milk cartons, stabbing a friend in the neck, and paper straws with a loose associative logic of actual thinking. A singular observation triggers another, which triggers a chain of thoughts, which triggers a footnote, a footnote used as an excuse to go deeper. Nothing resolves into a thesis. It just keeps moving, the same way that a blog post might start with one small observation and end up somewhere totally unrelated three paragraphs later. That's the first half of the confusion: the book performs spontaneity. The footnotes, they interrupt the main text the way a blogger might interrupt themselves with an aside, unsure whether it belongs in the post proper or not, but includ...