I've been thinking about the Woolf remark that I copied out for you yesterday: "I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museum the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh." In other words, Woolf claims that her need to describe is not like passion but like a desire for passion. For some reason I can't stop thinking about this statement, and I can't decide whether it simply makes me sad or whether it proves to me that she was a canny and ironic observer of art's revisionist powers. There is something terrible in this sentence's detachment from the roots of desire, yet its focus and commitment is nonetheless obsessive and alluring. However I read it, the comment disturbs me--which is not bad, which is probably good, which is undoubtedly tonic--yet I found it by accident yesterday. I didn't mean to read it. I wasn't even waiting for it.