QOTD - On writing, with a footnote about dying

He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language.  Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

- Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928)

A book I have meant to read for years and only am getting to now at last because there is a copy in my home that doesn't actually belong to me, and I don't have any idea when the owner will want it.*  As far as I'm concerned, I'd prefer returning the owner to the book than the other way around, but I get no say in the matter.  So I must get through it fairly quickly and savor it less than I might get to otherwise (yes, yes, I am sure I could find another copy if I must), and let some of the other books I'm currently reading gather dust or creases in their covers from being banged around in my messenger bag with good intent.

---

*This is not the only reason I am feeling the need to read a book about a character undergoing a series of transformations, written by a lovelorn author for and about the woman she yearned for.  But the owner's delayed rush and ambitious coyness about the withdrawal of items is the ticking and tocking of a hard and insubstantial deadline that on an emotional level makes one think of the death row inmate who has been told he will die and when, only to have the time put on pause, reset, and fast-forward according to the whims of a Kafkaesque appeals process where one is told the manner and inevitability of one's murder without being told how or when or having any meaningful contact with one's judge and executioner, who remains mostly incommunicado.  The executioner is in a hurry to be done, it seems, yet she might send a text tomorrow or next week to say she would like to pick up or box a few things; the inmate wonders if this could be read as a reprieve or merely a procedural delay that means nothing and hopes for a letter from a lawyer or a kindly word from the prison chaplain.  He fritters and learns how to train a rat to perform tricks, or how to knit with bits of string pulled from his trouser hems and knitting needles improvised from a pair of dull pencils he smuggled out of the library in his rectum, or he memorizes the names of birds he might see never again, or reads his Bible and debates himself about theodicy, or tries to remember the sound of a lover's snoring.  The usual things, and in the morning he will be awakened by the thud of sunrise coming through the dirty inch thick glass of the narrow window near the ceiling and do it all again, it all again being primarily the aforementioned exercises while awaiting the advocate or the priest.