How many times has it come
down to starting a task, perhaps one you could really care less to do, and you
find yourself focusing on something so small and minuscule you are not really
sure why your eye landed there? You begin to wonder what it is, how it came to be,
and why you stomach is rumbling if you ate no more than an hour ago. Suddenly,
you realize you are thinking about how you are going to cure cancer but
isolating one cell and realize it was all traced back to the thought of one
tiny spot. It is amazing how these thoughts trail away to beautiful places and
Virginia Woolf captures this in “The Mark on the Wall.” Within her short story,
Woolf is able to show how stream on conscious breeds imagination and reflection
all through the focus on the minuscule.
Woolf’s story takes her
readers on a journey to discovery, paragraph by paragraph as she tries her best
to determine in her boredom what the spot on the wall is. The spot really is of
little importance, for knowing what it is or how it got there would change
nothing about the here and now. However, what the spot does for her imagination
is amazing. She is taken on a ride to the old owners, the ignorance of
humanity, things that have come and gone, and so on until finally her task has
come to an end and she determines the spot was in fact a snail.
The truly amazing thing
about this story is the journey through imagination while sitting within the
mundane. Woolf was able to breathe a new life within the everyday we all
experience which is true art. It is now time to pause and look out beyond at
the spot on the wall and see where imagination takes you.
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