I read Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” from The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. I love how you wander with her, watching her mind catch on an object and expand it into entire worlds. She flips seamlessly between what’s in front of her and her imagination, weaving in memories and awareness. Her description of used books especially grabbed me:
Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books. They have come together in vast flocks and variegated feather and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
A couple of other Kindle highlights:
Am I here or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves.
Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.
Of course Woolf’s fundamental questioning of identity caught my attention.
Where does the self actually live? Not in the body walking the street, not in the memory being recalled, but in that fluid space between. The “true self” isn’t fixed to any single location or moment. It exists in motion, in the act of wandering itself.
She suggests we’re most authentic when we stop trying to anchor ourselves to one version of who we are. When we release control and let consciousness roam freely across time, space, memory, and imagination, that’s when we touch something real. The self isn’t a thing to be pinned down but a process of continual movement and transformation.
This connects nicely to her street haunting philosophy: the point isn’t the destination or even the observations made along the way. It’s the permission to be multiple, contradictory, everywhere and nowhere at once. The truest version of yourself might be the one that refuses to stay put, that insists on its right to drift, associate, and transform without justification.
In chaos magick terms, she’s describing the self as something that emerges through practice rather than something that exists prior to it. Identity as verb, not noun.