Yamuni Kaijumi

Every time I think about Lily Briscoe, I feel this ache not sadness exactly, but the ache of recognizing someone who understands that love and distance can coexist. Lily paints the people around her not to capture them, but to reach them from afar. It’s like she knows that the closer you get to someone, the blurrier they become so she steps back, searching for a truth that only appears through space. Her art feels like both a rebellion and an act of care. She refuses to imitate the world as it is; she wants to make sense of it through shape and color, through stillness. Woolf lets her exist in this fragile balance deeply observant, but never fully seen. I think that’s what moves me most: Lily doesn’t need to be understood to understand. When she finally draws that single line through the canvas at the end, it feels like a quiet revelation not resolution, but peace. She finishes not because she’s found the perfect image, but because she’s accepted that perfection doesn’t exist. You can love people and still never truly reach them. You can create, knowing it’s incomplete, and that’s still enough.

Reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream always feels like slipping into a fever dream. Everyone’s enchanted, confused, or arguing about love and somehow it all makes perfect sense. It’s not even about romance; it’s about madness. What I love most is how everyone is so dramatic. The lovers keep changing who they adore like it’s a group chat gone wrong, and the fairies are just vibing, causing chaos for fun. But underneath all the comedy, there’s this eerie truth the idea that love isn’t logical or moral, it’s a kind of magic that rewires you completely. Every time I reread this, I realize it’s less about happy endings and more about how chaotic it is that people fall in love at all.

As I was reading The Sorrows of Young Werther, I was taken aback by how I felt like I was eavesdropping on Werther’s thoughts. This story is structured as letters to Wilhelm, so the style of the writing feels intimate and raw. The readers can feel his true, unfiltered thoughts and emotions going into the letters. Sometimes the letters can go on and on about the mundane happenings in his life, such as talking about nature, his art, or just how he is feeling that day. We can see big mood shifts from his feeling borderline suicidal to having the biggest joy ride of his life. Sometimes, I found this formatting to be a bit dramatic and over the top, but I enjoyed how genuine this felt. Again, it almost reads like a diary entry.

While reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce, it wasn’t the everyday, mundane, and tedious aspects of Stephen’s life that caught my attention, but the outside myths and stories that surround Stephen’s life. As a young boy, he didn’t just imagine himself in these mythical beings, but used art as a way to reinvent himself to escape his insecure boyhood. At first, his last name, Dedalus, which is linked to an ancient Greek figure, almost serves as a heavy burden over his head. As a young boy, his last name stood as a reminder of something he could become or grow into as he ages, but at the moment, he’s borrowing the art from these figures and is not able to create art himself. He wants to be like Daedalus, the brilliant inventor who created wings for his son, but right now he’s still in the process of building his own artistic identity, and we as the readers, do not know what form that will take. I love how distant stories aren’t so distant to this character; instead, they serve as a script for what he can become.

Reading The Moon and Sixpence left me feeling very frustrated. Charles Strickland is buns his art might be considered “great” to certain people, but his humanity is empty. I know the story is not narrated from his perspective, so it makes it harder to connect with Strickland. Not getting full access to his thoughts or emotions leaves the readers with other characters' confusion or admiration. It is like this book does not want you to understand or comprehend the mind of a “genius” but that makes the character feel cold and empty. I find it hard to admire Strickland because the more he pursues art, the more it feels like erasure and not liberation for the reader. He paints, but destroys all these great human connections along the way by rejecting love, empathy, and even responsibility. None of his actions is noble or courageous; it's cowardice disguised as having purpose. Maugham seems very fascinated by this topic, like can art exist without moral compromise, but what is the purpose of having this artwork if the artist is left spiritually hollow at his deathbed? Strickland keeps claiming he’s searching for the truth, but in the book, it felt more like he was running away from the accountability of anyone who asked him to care. He leaves many connections behind, only to end up with Ata on a tropical island. But she doesn’t challenge Strickland or ask for any emotional intimacy from him. He likes people who let him stay untouched. She is a safe choice precisely because she asks for nothing. Maybe that’s the only kind of love he can stand, one that doesn’t demand growth. The novel really feeds off this tortured artist persona, where genius and cruelty coexist, so the readers are forced to see the aftermath of his artwork and the people he burns through.