When I was studying English literature, I remember being particularly struck by this passage in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own:

“What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.” 

“Are you insane?” was one of my first thoughts on this melancholic and allegedly spring morning. My alarm was set early so that I could drag myself out of bed in order to deliberately sit and do nothing.