“A feeling of depression is on me, as if we were old & near the end of all things.” VW, diary, 2 Aug 1924, p. 307. The rest of the entry makes it clear this was just a mood, but the metaphor captures much of my own mood in the second half of this second decade of the 21st century.

“I foresee, to return to The Hours, that this is going to be the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer & so masterful. I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it. The design is certainly original, & interests me hugely.” VW, diary, 19 Jun 1923, p. 249.

“…[Ralph Partridge] behaves like a bull in a garden. And with it he is malicious. He is a male bully, as L[eonard] says. I am reminded of the tantrums of Adrian & Clive. There is something maniacal in masculine vanity.” VW, diary, 28 Jul 1922 (and yet, Ralph was called Ralph because Lytton Strachey re-christened him, and Ralph let him do so, and then named his own son Lytton – a son who married VW’s great-neice. But it’s the last sentence that is the quotation here, only it needs context. Oddly, RP doesn’t have his own wiki, only a link redirecting to the entry for Frances – he literally only exists in the stories about the other BG members).

“It is fatal not to write the thing one wants to write at the moment of wanting to write it. Never thwart a natural process.” VW, diary, 2 Oct 1918

In a letter from Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, two very remarkable events are reported: one is Rupert Brooke’s election to the Cambridge Apostles, and the other is the play-reading group that the Stephen siblings and their Cambridge alumni friends have formed:

p. 139 “If only Clive were a little less Clivy, it would be perfect…”

the editor of VW’s early diaries places the first play-reading in December, 1907. Leonard Woolf was in Ceylon at this time.