The+Strange+Thing+About+Life

"The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it. The streets of London have their map; but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?"

I thought this was an especially profound passage in the novel so far. Woolf brings up such an intriguing point that there is no road map to life. The fact is that nobody could make an accurate road map because unlike the streets of London, people are always changing. There are not only differences from person to person, but also changes happen throughout a person's entire life. But while she has the point that we will never know what to expect when we turn the corner, or when we encounter something new in life, I wonder if she's right that "no one has left any adequate account of it." I'd like to think that through novels, thousands of passions have been charted. Maybe her point is that while other's have been charted, ours have not. I find this to be a good thing. Even if life had a road map, I would hate to look at it. Part of living is going into uncharted territory. People need to figure out their lives for themselves. Thank God for no road maps; we'd be more lost than ever. 1201405848

I too found that quote to be especially meaningful, but taking it this passage within the context of the novel, isn't this what Virginia Woolf is trying to do with Jacob, write down his account? Is she trying to be this person to leave an adequate account of life behind? I agree with LDo's point that everyone's experience of life is different and certainly the time difference between Jacob's life and our own separates us even more, but don't our common experiences of life connect us. While we do not have a road map, while we cannot know what awaits us beyond the next corner, we can certainly make predictions. I cannot tell if I will die tomorrow, but I can predict what I will do tomorrow. I especially found it interesting that Virginia Woolf choose to say "our passions are uncharted." This elicits more of a response in me than if she had just said "our lives are uncharted." For some reason, by writing passions, Woolf seems to imply that we do not know our own feelings and emotions, and maybe we don't. I guess it arises out of some sense of "know thyself" that I imagine I do know my passions or emotions, but then again our emotions are as erratic as the sea and we can hardly predict where our passions will lead us or change us along the course of life. I guess this is another example of how much depth some of Virginia Woolf's passages have. 1201579414

I like the double entendre of the very last sentence, "What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?" If you think about it in reference to the streets of London, then you will know exactly what to expect in terms of location because everything is mapped out for you. Sure, if I make a left here I will pass Big Ben or Westminster Abbey because that is where the map says it is located. However, even when you turn a corner, people on the streets could make walking down the street unpredictable. Even if you know where you are going, you cannot be fully prepared for what life has in store. So, when she asks us what we'll meet, we could take it two different ways: where are you going, or what's going to happen?

This supports her thoughts about our passions: they're uncharted, unpredictable, inconsistent. It is human nature to be ever-changing, which is why she constantly switches points of view. She can't stay with one person because that would be a constant, and humanity is not constant. 1201640026

One could say that Woolf is trying to write down Jacob's account, as AHa mentioned, and to go with all of this mapping business, one could also say that Woolf is trying to map many places at once. I mentioned in another topic that one life is not one life at all, and that humans affect eachother in unpredictable ways. A person can alter another's destination in life. Or a person can simply redirect the other's thoughts into a tangent. If someone redirected Jacob's thoughts, that redirection would not exist without another person. Woolf would include this other person, because (s)he caused the slightest change in Jacob's life, and deserves credit. We see Woolf's book as chaos. This idea of chaos is one that has come up in class a few times. Woolf is just trying to straighten out the chaos which is our every day lives through her book, and many don't like it because they've never tried to organize their own lives. Whether I know it or not, probably thousands of people have contributed to the creation of my passions, feelings, preferences, humor, fears. Woolf is trying to put these thousands on the map. It might not have a compass or a key. We don't know how many other roads or landmarks will be added in the future. The map is what is known, and since when have we known life to be perfectly clear and objective? 1201646287

I think you guys are right in saying that human passions are uncharted and that Virginia Woolf is trying to “map out” Jacob’s life. As Kle has pointed out, thousands of people are responsible for any one person’s passions. If you look at Virginia Woolf’s book as an attempt to place all of these passions that affect Jacob’s life in one spot or in one edition I think it is safe to say that it was a nice attempt but that she failed. There is no way anyone could possibly hope to account for everyone’s passions and how they are formed, even in fiction. She does a nice job of it even though she fell a little short and she was probably one of the first to try to write a book in this fashion, which is why she is a famous writer. I must argue against one point in all of this. LDo said that life has no road maps and that they make us more lost than ever. Religion tries to provide people with road maps. They try to influence how we live our lives, what passions we feel, and how to live out those passions. They tell us what to do in certain situations when we are confronted with certain passions. Without getting too religious, that’s what Jesus did. He gave us a road map to a better, more fulfilling life. 1201647434

I believe that her objective was successful. Sure, she can not accurately write about the thoughts and passions of a person, but who ever thought she could? Even if she was writing every thought in her own mind, without leaving her pen and paper, I am positive she could not get them all down. Like we discussed in class the other week, thoughts are fleeting. They come and go like the wind. But, what Virginia Woolf does do is convey the very idea that thoughts are fleeting by her cinematic writing style. Like a mind, she jumps in and out of situations and scenes with perfect flexibility. A mind, like Woolf's writing stye, is not confined by a structure, but rather, she comes and goes when pleases. She is telling us some of the countless fleeting moments in the mind of her main character Jacob. She did not attempt to achieve the impossible through the creation of this novel, but rather, convey the essense of thoughts. And Yes, that is exactly what Jesus did! He gave us the invitation to choose Him, but it is up to us to decide whether or not to accept it. He gave us the blueprint for gaining an eternity of bliss with Him. 1201656210

That quote from the novel and even this discussion has really made me think. Life is a very confusing thing as we all know but what she said about never "mapping out" human nature makes sense, yet at the same time I also kind of wonder why we haven't. I agree with the previous posts in that Woolf is mapping out Jacob's life in this novel. She is describing in cinematic detail, as previous posts have said, the life of thoughts (now that's confusing...). But in a way, she is attempting to do what I think every one of us tries do to do at some point in our life. She attempts at fully understanding Jacob and describing human nature through him. I give her credit for taking on a difficult task, and she does is so eloquently too. The style she uses in writing the novel parallels the way the human mind works in that we are not always thinking in a sequential order, all day long. Our thoughts drift in and out on different topics and therefore the novel does a similar thing. I wish I could write something like this about my life because it would help me understand who I am even more. But at the same time, just as the quote from the book says, I do not think that we can ever pinpoint how human nature works because each and every one of us is different in some way. 1201828634

Maybe the reason she says no one has left any adequate account of it is because it is impossible. The limits to which life is restricted are in a sense inexistent - there are so many possibilities. How can someone make an account of life? Endless paths cross, people move in and out of your life, and it is not possible to remember and recover every detail from each interaction. Woolf displayed the aspect of people weaving in and out of one's life quite well, which is important for us to recognize, but it doesn't encompass them all. And yes, we have passions, but can one really comprehend what we felt by what we write down or record? No one will ever know how many times and which matters run through our minds, or how much everything influences us. Places, such as London, are concrete places that have set structures and landmarks. They can be mapped because they are not at a constant change. Life is abstract, and its depth and directions for one can never be completely understood by another. 1201837757

I actually really like this passage, because I think it helps not only to describe the lives of the people in the novel, but it helps bring the novel together for the reader. Everyone in class was struggling with the idea that the plot of this book was so sporadic and jumped through time and space so quickly that it was almost incomprehensible. Perhaps Woolf was just trying to suggest, through writing the novel in this fashion, that life itself is hard to comprehend and may appear to jump around through time and space. Perhaps putting this small passage in the novel was Woolfe's way of attempting to explain to the reader why she has chosen to write such a new and individual style of novel. In writing __Jacob's Room__ in such a fashion, Woolf was showing us how life could be hard to understand, but it all comes to one definitive end, even if we don't have a "map" to show us how we're going to get there. 1201899199

While many people have attempted to leave accounts of passions and the lives of human beings none of them can be adequate because no one would read an adequate account of life. For example when you read a novel everything is never written down. The only things that are written down are what the author thinks are exciting or revelent to the main story. The mundane details and those times in life in which nothing that will further what the author is trying to put forth are simply not included because a novel can only put forth a set number of ideas and events. Most novels want you to get from point A to point B (though some try to convince you that there is neither point A or point B). They start you off with a certain amount of material and the author wants (and hopes) that by the end of it you will get and understand the idea they were proposing. They don't completely map out the entire human experience within that time frame because 1.) the point they were trying to make would get lost in the jumble and 2.) It would be too long, take too long to write, and more importantly probably wouldn't sell because most people don't like having every aspect of life explained out to them (they want to live it for themselves) and a book that contained a road map of everything for the human experience would probably contain so much information that you would spend half the time looking through such an enormous volume that you would spend your life trying to find out how to live it instead of living it. Novels are not supposed to be atlases covering the whole earth and countries to try and cram as much human experience into one singular space, because to do that is ultimately an exercise in futility. The book __Jacob's Room__ can be said to do that exactly but the point of the book is the disconnection of life and so even though it is futile and the author knows that it is futile she still does it to make a point that it is futile to do so (among other themes that can be derived from the books). user:DGr-c

I actually really like this quote from Woolf as a summary of life and where things go in life. I mean, we all know the basic outline of life, but we have no clue how things are going to happen. For example, everyone will fall in love at some point in life maybe more than once, but no one has any clue when it's going to happen, how it's going to happen, with whom it's going to happen, etc.; we simply cannot possibly know the details of what is coming to us in the future. The same could be said of Jacob who I guarantee didn't think he might fall in love in Italy at some point and probably didn't have the slightest clue that he would die in a war and lead a short life. There's no way of predicting any of the specifics of what will happen in life in advance. Yes, life does have a beginning and an end, but the rest is a giant gray area where a million possibilities can happen, and no one has any way of seeing around the corner to what's going to happen. Jacob is simply an example of this idea that Woolf presents about not knowing what's going to happen in life and how it's going to happen. I mean, could Jacob ever have had any clue that Bonamy was going to fall in love with him? There's no way Jacob could have ever seen that coming, and just like most of life, he could have never predicted it in advance. I think though that that is the thrill of life; most of the time we have no clue what is going to happen or if anything is going to happen until it happens.1201904497

What would life really be like if we were all given our own map to follow at birth? That's actually really interesting to think about. First of all, life would be very boring. We would know where we were headed at all times, so there would be no room to hope for a better and different tomorrow. Also, there would be no changing it. What about other peoples' maps? How would theirs affect yours? A map would be convenient some of the time. If you felt lost, it may be nice to check out where you were, but I honestly don't think I would use it. I guess I would be scared to see what it revealed. I'd rather just experience it as I went along. It's also fun to daydreams about which road we will take and where they will lead us. Although it may be frustrating and confusing, deciding what road to chose in our life is a wonderful freedom. Is that what draws us to reading about character's lives, such as Jacob's? His life, his road map, is already written down, it will never change. Ours however is not written for us, it's like the song by Natasha Bedingfield, "Unwritten." "Staring at the blank page before us . . . reaching for something in the distance . . . today is where your book begins, the rest is still unwritten." We make our own map, adding a lit bit as we go along each day. That to me is a very beuatiful part of life, a blessing.1201911482

AGe, I have to completely agree with you. This concept of freewill is what makes living life so worth it. I seriously that we have some sort of vague map, but through our daily decisions we decide how to get to our final destination. Predestined life would be completely pointless; every day we would just get up and simply go through the motions. Plus, if we were not happy with something in our lives, we would be incapable of altering it. However, I think that I would actually enjoy having a life map to guide me at times. What college would be the best choice for me? What career do I actually want to persue. I mean yes if our lives were already mapped out life would be generally frustrating, but it would also take out the fear of the unknown and the doubt of success we all holed. Jacob has hit his final destination in his own way; if we were in his shoes, what choices would we have made differently? How would we have lived his life? 1201920764

I agree with LDo that I would like to believe that through literature, our passions have been charted. But I don't think it applies only to literature. Through our accomplishments, art, music, constructions, movies, a general map of humanity has been created. If Aliens were to come to this planet with the earth deserted except for what we left behind in all of those forms of art, they would have a pretty good idea of what a human was, or what desires and passions drove us to create what we have created. But I also agree that our general map of humanity is indeed general and not absolute. Our art and literature can open our eyes to knew passions, desires and opportunities, in a sense guiding us, but they are merely that- a guide. Our own personal passions are uncharted and simply a mystery to us, which only motivates me to keep reading my story.1201929499