Shilling in serpentine

If a person is lonely in the dialogue, then how to overcome the dictate of dialogue? Obviously, not rational

Once I really liked one girl.

She was a few years older than me, confidently spoke stupid things, swinging with straight red hair back and forth, and looked at the world languidly-exactly the lady from Shalot from the picture of Waterhouse.

Once she helped me learn two important truths: that it is impossible to understand the other and that nevertheless we are all terribly similar to each other.

It was late evening, February - not ice, but one in which you can throw your scarf on the girl.

We walked along the embankment, climbed the bridge, and then it became so good for me that I sang. Soon a couple in love passed. I shouted: "Look, what a magical girl!" - And he pointed to the lady from Shalot.

As soon as we reached the Park of Culture metro station, she turned sharply and said:

“I'll go now, and you stand here.” And don't write to me.

We have never seen each other again. But I was two hundred, three hundred percent sure that she likes me!

I returned to the bridge. He looked at the Moscow River and thought. It was more painful than refusal, I was from the inconsistency of the expectations of reality. How could I be so deceived?

Suddenly, I seemed to be stabbed to me-I looked around, and it turned out that very close to me, of course, not noticing me, just like me, leaning on the bridge, stood a guy whom we met ten minutes ago. He also looked at the Moscow River and thought. The girl was not next to him.

He looked at me.

And I felt better.

However, for the first time, the English modernist Virginia Wolfe in the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” wrote about this 100 years ago.

Its action takes place in London within one June day of 1923. The main character, Clarissa Dalloway, is preparing for an evening reception, which all her friends and acquaintances should come to. This seemingly insignificant event becomes the semantic center of the novel, to which the development of events, feelings, and experiences, shown from the points of view of close Clarissas, ghosts from its past and completely unfamiliar British, are striving for a parallel. As a typically modernist novel, Mrs. Dalloway, refuses the figure of the omniscient author and replaces it with a controlled stream of consciousness, many subjective views that fragment the book, turning it into a kind of kaleidoscope, in which each glass is a separate fate; On the other hand, instead of the Joyce outliving, tightness, Wolfe offers a clearly organized narrative, in which, having figured out, it is impossible to get confused again. Time beat off the blows of Big Ben, the characters are clearly outlined, and their relationships are more or less clear from the very beginning; Finally, the incorporation of objective reality is built at a time designated principle - and in the future this principle follows strictly.

Why is such an angle, in general, it is clear: the Generation of Wolf, brought up on Bergson’s intuitionism and Freud psychoanalysis, who met the chaotic XX century with the restraint of the XIX century, no longer believed in objective Balzakic reasons with spelled logic of characters and compulsory morality at the end. Not a single book of Wolf is no moral, the answer to the question "What did the author want to say?" You will not find.

“Mrs. Dalloway” is, of course, a novel about the impossibility of communication, about the weak of the human language.

Peter Walsh was in love with Clarissa for many years, but at the most crucial moment she cannot admit to her; The hero of the war Septimus, the lost generation in vitro, does not accept the world, and the world does not accept it; In the end, Clarissa herself, the only gift of which is to “feel, almost guess people”, does not find a common language with his daughter and with her husband, whom he loves, but with whom he is burdened.

Yes, a person is not one, there is a lot of him (“I will certainly have a myriad of me everywhere,” as Yegor Letov sang). At each individual point in time, a person is different: he is formed more than once and for all a certain social environment, and each time new memories, sensations, emotions. The language is able to convey only a small fraction of this diversity: like any sign system, it is limited - if, even gathering in a certain grammatical unit, the words cry out the meanings, giving us the opportunity to understand the interlocutor in two ways, this does not hurt the situation; After all, the point is not in what was said, but in unspoken, in the failures between words, that one of my good friends calls the style. Perhaps the style is able to show a changeable complexity of a person, but in ordinary speech we say, as a postmodern writers: the PalimpSestus occupies the place of the individual style in us. Thus, so that everyone does not become poets without exception, you need to look for some third way of communication, natural and at the same time affordable.

If a person is lonely in the dialogue, then how to overcome the dictate of dialogue? Obviously not rational; Dialogue - this is the form of understanding, erasing direct experience, an organic reaction to the world. And Wolf concludes that it is precisely such a reaction that unites people. The initial perception, not clouded by the rationalizing beginning, a priori is aesthetically and ethical, because it is beautiful and correct. It is one for everyone-and all the characters of the novel feel together, in unison, when they are distracted from their experiences to the noise of the motor of the airplane flying over London or an important person-either the prime minister, or the queen herself.

Human daily care is interrupted by these rare moments of the affinity of souls, exposing the true, alleged nature of things.

I felt it then on the bridge. In another person, absolutely not knowing anything about him, I felt everything that was already in me. In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Wolf prescribes two characters who are able to feel the truth constantly-these are medium people (Thomas Eliot would call them poets) Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

• Clarissa is a medium of life. She feels her as if herself is life, unifying and alarming, loving and beloved. It concentrates a bunch of intertwined neurons, which wrapps an invisible connection of all the characters of the novel, attracting them to itself.

• Septimus is the medium of death. Of course, now this figure is closer to the Zhovial figure of Clarissa Dalloway. The poor wife of Lucretius, Italian, who married without love, is not able to understand him, but we well understand: the heroes of Selin, Hemingway, Remarque are extremely close to modern Russians.

In the best stage of Clarissa’s book, which until the end of the novel will not meet Septimus, will suddenly feel it. He will understand all his experiences. Clarissa compares the life of a septimus with her, a serpentine shilling thrown into the lake and suddenly physically feels a connection with the world: “She went to the window. In it - even though this is a stupid thought - there was its particle, in a rural, spacious sky, heaven over Westminster. ”

Clarissa’s children's memory (thrown into a serpentine shilling) - at the same time about parting with reality and its adoption - helps us to recover from two visual ailments: from a myopic -free of faith by the word and a farsighted denial of the connection, not only existing among all people, but also uniting people with animals and plants, moss and snow, heaven and earth. And he teaches to see beauty in this connection.

Then, many years ago, before leaving the bridge, I threw a ten -ruble coin into the river.

Who knows where she is now?