To the Lighthouse: The Lighthouse, 11 Summary & Analysis

On the lawn looking at the sea, Lily thinks about how one’s impression of and feelings about people depend so much on distance. In the quiet, she feels “the unreality” of the early morning and thinks that “it was a way things had sometimes…they became unreal,” as when one returned from a trip or emerged from sickness, and, seeming unreal, also seemed most startling, most alive. And one was most free, then, liberated from social convention, habit, small talk.

Dissatisfied with her painting, Lily feels that she keeps losing track of it when she thinks of Mr. Ramsay. She thinks of beauty when what she wants to express is fresher, “the thing itself before it has been made anything.” She feels how inadequate is “the human apparatus for painting or for feeling.”

Sitting down on the lawn, Lily feels that “everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time,” and compares her experience of it to a train rider seeing scenery pass along a route he will never ride again.

Seeing Mr. Carmichael, Lily wonders about his sorrow, his experience, his poetry, which she has never read. They only share the experience of staying in a house and making small talk. Still, she thinks that it is “one way of knowing people…the outline, not the detail.” She recalls how he had never liked Mrs. Ramsay.

Lily thinks back on Mrs. Ramsay, on her idiosyncrasies and unique character. She thinks how Mrs. Ramsay differed both from herself and Mr. Carmichael in having an “instinct to go” and always running off on an errand, a good deed, an activity. Whereas Lily and Mr. Carmichael both privilege thought over action, and Mrs. Ramsay’s activeness could thus seem “a reproach.”

Lily thinks of Mr. Tansley, who had become a professor and whom she’d once heard give a lecture during the war on “brotherly love” that struck her as ironic considering his own unlovable character. Still, she knows her own impression of Tansley is “grotesque” since so many of one’s ideas about other people are self-serving, “whipping-boys.”

Lily stirs her brush among the ants on the lawn and distresses them by making them a small mountain to climb.

Lily thinks how one would need more than fifty pairs of eyes to see one woman because, in order to see her fully, one would have to see her in her every aspect and from every perspective.

Lily considers Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s marriage and feels like she can remember their courtship, which she never witnessed. She does not invent it, but rather feels that amidst the Ramsays “in the rough and tumble of daily life” there was “constantly a sense of repetition” which set up confluences and echoes. Still, Lily reminds herself not to romanticize their marriage, remembering the glimpses she’d gotten of their arguments and hard-won resolutions. But then they’d emerge from the difficulty and would be restored to “be as usual.”

Sitting still on the lawn, Lily appears to be in a trance even as she is “moving underneath with extreme speed.” Somebody in the house sits down at the window where Mrs. Ramsay had once sat and Lily thinks, painting again, that the goal is to feel that the objects of the world are completely ordinary and completely miraculous at the same time.

The windowpane goes white as if a breeze had blown a curtain over it and Lily feels thrown into despair. But the despair, then, “became part of ordinary experience” and Lily feels that Mrs. Ramsay sits knitting in the chair. Lily goes to the edge of the lawn still holding her brush to look out at the sea for Mr. Ramsay.