“…it was a matter of anxious moment to her that Lisa Stillman should like her brother-in-law, or that a workman wounded in an accident should find healthy employment. She kept herself marvelously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us. People of the most diverse kinds came to her when they had reason to rejoice or to weep… And it must be owned that living thus at high pressure she contrived to invest the whole scene with an inimitable bravery as though she saw it properly composed, of fools, clowns and splendid Queens, a vast procession on the march towards death. This intense preoccupation with the event of the moment arose partly no doubt because nature had fitted her to deal victoriously with such matters; and also because she had inborn in her and [had] acquired a deep sense of the futility of all effort, the mystery of life. You may see the two things in her face. ‘Let us make the most of what we have, since we know nothing of the future.’ was the motive that urged her to toil so incessantly on behalf of happiness, right doing, love; and the melancholy echoes answered ‘What does it matter? Perhaps there is no future.’ Encompassed as she was by this solemn doubt her most trivial of activities had something of grandeur about them; and her presence was large and austere, bringing with it not only joy and life, exquisite fleeting femininities, but the majesty of a nobly composed human being.”
– Virginia Woolf, writing of her mother Julia, in the autobiographical essay “Reminiscences” (from Moments of Being)
A DAMSEL'S COMPENDIUM 