"But the letter which Mr Floyd found on the table when he got up early next morning did not begin 'I am much surprised,' and it was such a motherly, respectful, inconsequent, regretful letter that he kept it for many years; long after his marriage with Miss Wimbush, of Andover; long after he had left the village."
In this scene, Mrs Flanders agonizes over the contents of her note to Mr Floyd. We see her consider what to include and how she fidgets while considering how to incorporate her feelings about marriage into her thoughts of the man. Directly after she feels emotion due to his mention of "love," she becomes distracted thinking about the everyday. Yet when he wakes up, Mr Floyd sees something which remains in his awareness for decades. This quote plays into Virginia Woolf's sense of permanence and the ephemeral: something which is written in one context means something else in another, and the physical element outlasts the passing emotion which causes it to exist.
"As this was Cambridge, as [Mrs Norman] was staying there for the weekend, as she saw nothing but young men all day long, in streets and round tables, this sight of her fellow-traveller was completely lost in her mind, as the crooked pin dropped by a child into the wishing-well twirls in the water and disappears for ever."
Here, we see Virginia Woolf's commitment to physical comparison. She often uses the future to help contextualize a moment as it occurs, and the finality of this simile helps conclude a train of thought that ends the section. Woolf qualifies the moment using phrases that begin with "as," and her use of commas helps show that the moment in which Mrs Norman could interact with Jacob passes by instantaneously. We also see the sense of repetition Woolf feels for locations such as Cambridge, where generations of young men arrive to be educated and learn to be a certain type of individual.
"Anyhow, whether undergraduate or shop boy, man or woman, it must come as a shock about the age of twenty--the world of the elderly--thrown up in such black outline upon what we are; upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the lighthouse; the sheep's jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intolerably disagreeable--'I am what I am, and intend to be it,' for which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes one for himself."
This quotation uses increasing generality to go from a particular subset of people to anyone, included as either sex. She uses the concept of reality to progress through icons in her writing, such as Byron, to progress as a young person would through vivid experiences to arrive at the stable self. The narrator arrives at Jacob through this context and all of a sudden reaches the point of action for Jacob as an individual.
"No doubt if this were Italy, Greece, or even the shores of Spain, sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education. But the Cornish hills have stark chimneys standing on them; and, somehow or other, loveliness is infernally sad."
A theme in the novel is that of loss. Jacob studies Greek and Latin after their civilizations end and experiences the natural world about which they wrote as a young person with energy. Woolf builds up around the idea of education that she returns to throughout the novel with settings that have clearly been read about, and then a setting that has been lived within. She displays tiers of adventures, as "the shores of Spain" is presented as a less desirable location for experiences. Because Jacob cannot frame his emotion in context of a story, the feeling at the root of his current state remains one-sided.
"'By Jove!' he exclaimed. 'You're the very man I want!' and without more ado they discovered the lines which he had been seeking all day; only they come not in Virgil, but in Lucretius."
An anonymous schoolmate of Jacob's arrives in his room with a question, and the two young men exchange this archetypical scene of the excitement of learning. Woolf uses this short scene as a way to indicate what she means by "education" throughout the novel, and as a way to observe that the students take their material in relation to their own lives. The writing of Lucretius and Virgil is very different, but Jacob and his friend read both as part of the traditional literary canon.
"'Probably,' said Jacob, 'we are the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant.'"
This shows the sense of grandeur which accompanies Jacob's life. We consistently see how ancient writers lead Jacob to feel a sense of triumph and an individual connection with their work. Ultimately, Jacob goes abroad, which begins the falling action of the novel; for now, he gets to experience what he learns at the deepest level.
"The night is not a tumultuous black ocean in which you sink or sail as a star. As a matter of fact it was a wet November night."
The opening image is not tactile, because we have no relation to the "you" with the capacity to "sail as a star." Instead, we experience the "wet November night," and we do so all the more so because of the abstract nature of the first image, as far as anything palpable is concerned. The water in the first sentence is observed, and the water in the latter sentence is felt. The lack of a comma before the final independent clause sets up the no-nonsense observation of the rest of the scene.
"And then, here is Versailles."
This sentence begins a transition to the motion of Versailles, as the narrator sees children and adults playing around in the lawns and a great fountain. This fountain is introduced with the phrase "and then." The repetition creates a sense of arrival, even as the things observed are fluid. After a section filled with banal comments, this direct statement without dialogue makes the relief of vacation especially clear.
"I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them. I like words to be hard--such were Bonamy's views, and they won him the hostility of those whose taste is all for the fresh growths of the morning, who throw up in the window, and find the poppies spread in the sun, and can't forbear a shout of jubilation at the astonishing fertility of English literature."
This quotation begins in a style very different than that of the narrator, and the reader is presented with three "I like" statements before recognizing that the material belongs to the opinion of Bonamy, an anxious and serious man. Images quickly take the place of declarations. We see the wryness of the narrator as the British novel is praised, but the action around it necessarily exists outside of its pages.
"Sustained entirely upon picture postcards for the past two months, Fanny's idea of Jacob was more statuesque, noble, and eyeless than ever."
Jacob spends most of the novel fascinated by the distance of the thinkers he admires, even though he can understand line by line what they noticed about the world. Fanny begins to consider Jacob in a similar way, because she reads his particular observations and has access to his thoughts in some sense, yet she lacks knowledge about what his life is actually like. The attributes he takes on in her mind are those of the Greeks as Jacob would see them, down to their lack of pupils in marble statues.
