WALK THE LINE
In her 1927 story Street Haunting, Virginia Woolf takes the narrator for a walk through the wintry streets of London at dusk to shop for a pencil. The protagonist walks and looks and lets herself be drawn into what she sees. Her imaginative self meets memory and history and makes an arc of time, set against contemporary Oxford Street and the River Thames, “rougher and grayer than remembered.”
“Draw things that affect you... Don’t pretend to be interested in things that you are not”
I love the sense in this story of watching through time, and I imagine myself drawing a line with the pencil that Woolf has tucked behind her ear on her return from
