Today’s text is from Virgina Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”
What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.
I think this is exactly the phenomenon which I’ve earlier tried to identify as non-verbal, non-symbolic experience.
“It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech.”
My best skeptical, reductionist explanation for this experience might hand-wave and point at the fact that symbolic speech is a relative newcomer on the evolutionary scene. Direct experience, meanhilwe, involves perceptual systems which lie far deeper in our brain. As such, there’s something about navigating by starlight that feels much more familiar, and much closer to “reality,” than reading a book or having a conversation.