The Thoughts of that Crazy Man Who Lives in the Mountains by Himself

Before we read A Room of One’s Own we were presented with the three main points that Virginia Woolf when writing this essay:

·         One must have money and privacy to write.

·         Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible.

·         The writer must be born into a world which never allows grievances to appear, or must be born of a soul made of stuff that will not bear the impress of resentment.

In my opinion; wrong, half-right, completely right, in that order. Those were opinions before we read A Room of One’s Own and they are exactly the same after. I am stubborn and my opinions are not easily swayed, so Woolf would’ve had to write a powerful and very, very convincing essay to make me change my mind. She did not. I’ll get back to that.

One must have money and privacy to write. Haha. First off, the only people that have complete privacy are those people that choose to live in the mountains alone, because they can’t stand what society has become. Second, when Woolf says money, I think she means rich, this might not be the case, but if it is, money has no affect on how creative you are, or if you have a story to tell. Maybe what Woolf meant was that you need to be able to sustain yourself.

 Genius needs freedom; it cannot flower if it is encumbered by fear, or rancor, or dependency, and without money freedom is impossible. I agree with what she says until she starts talking about money again. You don’t need money to be free; again I reference the guy who lives in the mountains alone with a crazy beard and a shotgun. But the first half is correct. Freedom itself is free and unaffected by the negative influences of life. You need freedom, or at least freedom of mind because what you write come from you and not a trapped, caged, negatively influence you.

The writer must be born into a world which never allows grievances to appear, or must be born of a soul made of stuff that will not bear the impress of resentment. I agree 100%. If you want to write well, in my opinion, it must come from you completely and not have been corrupted by all those little things that make every day difficult for the spirit. Any artist must have a resilient spirit that is unflinching and unchanging in the face of all the crap that the world just loves to throw at you. Also I think I’ll mention that crazy guy who lives in the mountains again, because I haven’t in this paragraph yet.

Back to why Woolf did not write a powerful and very persuasive essay. For me, the biggest thing was that she seemed to be contradictory. Woolf kept on saying that your work had to have integrity and not be affected by your anger and bitterness against the world, but it seemed like that’s how Woolf was writing to me. I also do not think Woolf’s essay was that great because she would not have been able to get her point off to her target audience. Her essay was about women writing, and it was written in a way that only intelligent, thinking people could understand. You know, the people who probably already agreed with her. The part of the population that Woolf would have to convince probably would not have known what she was talking about. Last time, that paranoid guy who lives in the hills and is self sufficient and is unable to deal live in what society has become. (That may be me one day…)