Jacob's Room: Jacob standing at the Parthenon:
“The extreme definiteness with which they stand, now a brilliant white, again yellow, and in some lights read, imposes ideas of durability, of the emergence through the earth of some spiritual energy elsewhere dissipated in elegant trifles. But this durability exists quite independently of our admiration. Although the beauty is sufficiently humane to weaken us, to stir the deep deposit of mud – memories, abandonments, regrets, sentimental devotions – the Parthenon is separate from all that; and if you consider how it has stood out all night, for centuries, you begni to connect the blaze (at midday the glare is dazzling and the frieze almost invisible) with the idea that perhaps it is beauty alone that is immortal…Far from being decayed, the Parthenon appears, on the contrary, likely to outlast the entire world” (144).

Fragmented, Lonely lives that value fact over feeling

Fosters desire for unity and immortality, which is unrecognizable in modern world

Rachel not being able to realize great writers exist in present day, that they could be as good as Thackery

Similarly, while reading Grimm’s fairy tale to her child one night, To the Lighthouse’s Mrs. Ramsay:
seemed to fold herself together, one petal closed in another, and the whole fabric fell in exhaustion upon itself, so that she had only strength enough to move her finger, in exquisite abandonment to exhaustion, across the page of Grimm’s fairy story, while there throbbed through her, like the pulse in a spring which has expanded to its full width and now gently ceases to beat, the rapture of successful creation” (42-43).

H.D., “A Poet in the Wilderness: Songs of Anacreon”: “Yet the poet is gone. Though we might wish to touch his hand, to make his humanity as important as his divinity, it is not possible. I should like to have touched his hand, to have counted his imperfections, to have said (to lure him to some outbreak of fine, poetic fervor), ‘Yes! all that, poetry is not enough – humanity is the thing that matters – as below, so are the gods above, let us get down, underneath things – learn, in humility, true greatness.’ Ah – but he would not let me. He is gone. There floats this legend through old textbooks, a date, an anecdote, but he, himself, is gone. He is gone, cruel in his immortality. He has left us – he has left me, and before me fingering this little volume, there is a path, set with small white paving-stones, a little edge of white marble, laid in long, even, slender, graceful blocks, stone blocks, imperceptible curves, two steps, columns, very small, very perfect.”

Jacob's Room: No doubt we should be, on the whole, much worse off than we are without our astonishing gift for illusion. At the age of twelve or so, having given up dolls and broken our steam engines, France, but much more probably Italy, and India almost for a certainty, draws the superfluous imagination. One’s aunts have been to Rome; and every one has an uncle who was last heard of – poor man – in Rangoon. He will never come back any more. But it is the governesses who start the Greek myth. Look at that for a head (they say) – nose, you see, straight as a dart, curls, eyebrows – everything appropriate to manly beauty; while his legs and arms have lines on them which indicate a perfect degree of development – the Greeks caring for the body as much as for the face. And the Greeks could paint fruit so that birds pecked at it. First you read Xenophon; then Euripides. One day – that was an occasion, by God – what people have said appears to have sense in it; ‘the Greek spirit’; the Greek this, that, and the other; though it is absurd, by the way, to say that any Greek comes near Shakespeare. The point is, however, that we have been brought up in an illusion. Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion, the Daily Mail crumpled in his hand; his legs extended; the very picture of boredom. ‘But it’s the way we’re brought up,’ he went on. And it all seemed to him very distasteful. Something ought to be done about it. And from being moderately depressed he became like a man about to be executed.

Talk with T.S. Eliot: ‘Missing trains is awful’ I said. ‘Yes. But humiliation is the worst thing in life’ he replied. ‘Are you as full of vices as I am?’ I demanded. ‘Full. Riddled with them.’ ‘We’re not as good as Keats’ I said. ‘Yes we are’ he replied. ‘No: we don’t write classics straight off as magnanimous people do.’ ‘We’re trying something harder’ he said. ‘Anyhow our work is streaked with badness’ I said. ‘Compared with theirs, mine is futile. Negligible. One goes on because of an illusion.’ He told me that I talked like that without meaning it. Yet I do mean it. I think one could probably become very intimate with Eliot because of our damned self conscious susceptibility: but I plunge more than he does: perhaps I could learn him to be a frog” (103-104).

About talking with Lytton Strachey: “Writing is an agony, we both agreed. Yet we live by it. We attach ourselves to the breath of life by our pens. The exciting illusion begins” (135).

“So we reflected upon these strange, on the whole merciful, dispensations, by which Roger always sees masterpieces ahead of him & I see great novels – We have our atmosphere of illusion, without which life would be so much duller than it is” (150).

‘It is those damned women,’ said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be. (This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of mind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks.)

Jacob looked set and even desperate by the light at the street corner; and yet composed. He was suffering perhaps. He was credulous. Yet there was something caustic about him. He had in him the seeds of extreme disillusionment, which would come to him from women in middle life. Perhaps if one strove hard enough to reach the top of the hill it need not come to him – this disillusionment from women in middle life