In a purely structural sense, the section is unnecessary. It’s awful to imagine such a loss, but Woolf could have transitioned from “The Window” to “The Lighthouse” with a few sentences explaining that a decade has passed, that Mrs. Ramsay, Prue, and Andrew are dead and the house fallen into disrepair. If plot means dealings among the characters, there is no real progression of plot here, but, at the same time, what plot is grander or more essential than time passing? In and around the Ramsays’ vacant house, the seasons pass and pass again; the sea advances and retreats; new life and decay cycle endlessly into each other. The confrontation of life’s persistence with death’s inevitability is thrilling.

As a reader, I want the house to be saved and repaired, made habitable again, but I also want it to crumble away, as everything must. I want to see it all. Yes, let the wind blow; let the swallow build; let the broken glass be tangled over with wild berries. “Only the lighthouse beam entered the rooms for a moment, sent its sudden stare over bed and wall in the darkness of winter, looked with equanimity at the thistle and the swallow, the rat and the straw,” but I want to go with it, to be the human gaze where there is no human gaze.

The planet is indifferent to the beginning or end of any individual life. Mrs. Ramsay’s death devastates her husband but means nothing to the house where she once lived, now occupied by “the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling.” Not one of us makes any difference to the waves, the thistle, the rat, the wind. Knowing that the only important thing about my single, finite life is my experience of it, I can’t help but want to squeeze more into its confines than is actually possible, and my best idea for how to do that is to read, to scoop a profusion of vicarious experiences into my lap like poker chips. My second best idea is to write, although I vastly prefer reading because it’s easier, more satisfying, more fun, and much, much faster. Writing is a geologically slow process, the drip-drip of a stalactite forming, and I am not a naturally patient person.

I come by impatience honestly. My father is a change-jingler and knee-jiggler for whom every commute is a road rally and who watches sports on mute because he can’t endure the commentators’ blather. My mother, on the other hand, spends most of her time making quilts: sewing together tiny bits of fabric, tearing out her work if the corners don’t align perfectly, ironing every little seam, adding embroidered embellishments by hand. She loves baseball. When I was little, she used to listen to spring training on the car radio, and the indolent crowd noise and the announcer’s leisurely calls bored me to the point of rage. Clearly, in this case, my father’s genes had shoved past my mother’s, determined to get there first.