I-Land is where memories and experiences turn into short stories, personal journal entries and narration in first person, part memoir, part fiction, exploring topics such as the relation between humans and the societies they live in.

Mrs. Dalloway On My Mind — An Xavier Letter Pt. 6 (A Darling Convention)

[Previously on Mrs. Dalloway On My Mind: So yeah, there’s not too much booze in my hands these days, no . . .]

. . . but plenty of Woolf, Virginia, plenty of her on my mind and on the tip of my tongue and pen lately, plenty of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith with Richard and Sally and Hugh, the entire Dalloway crowd, all the Fitzrovia and Victoria and Regent Park people and their surrounding neighborhoods and communities, the passers-by and patrons watching and catering to the traffic, the floating pundits in the streets — the demented lady tramp by the fountain, the old man in the room across the street flickering behind the curtains — all of them on my mind like a darling convention. Discursive Elizabeth, for example, braving the Strand against her mother’s wishes, always against her mother’s wishes, and stolid Mrs. Bruton, the spruce-right and formidable Lady Millicent Bruton and her regimented household, her indefatigable presence, so utterly opposite from Miss Kilman — poor wretched proud Kilman — and our poor wretched Peter Walsh, heartbroken and confused and so utterly adorable and sweet Peter Walsh, sad Peter Walsh, prevaricating boy-minstrel living in the wrong age on the wrong side of a love story, ricocheting across Central London in an effort to give purpose to his sweltering soul. Not far from him there’s Rezia, diminutive tragic Rezia from an Italy cherished but left behind all too eagerly in her quest for romance, giddy hat-maker now lost in an England once brimming with endless possibility, turning all too dark and desolate without the love of her dear Septimus, her glorious stoic Englishman gradually driven from his trademark silence to a chattering lunacy of the most perfidious acumen; a man now seeing dead people in the bushes and life eternal in the trees — don’t cut down the trees, they’re the essence of life itself; don’t cut them down or else nature will come after you, it will be on you like the plague, brandishing Dr. Holmes and Sir William Bradshaw, its favorite weapons. They will come after you and set themselves on you like hounds, beasts of a most sophisticated nature, all pretense and authority, indictment, advancing and twisting nature’s plans with an agenda so full of purpose, so dense with ideology and command, these leaders of men and women, these wardens and jailers . . .

Watch this space for Part 7