Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been
given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it
would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life
is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto
life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her
books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with
leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with
savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and
anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness
and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to
our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes
what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner
privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’
prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.
....There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of
self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can
feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner
selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of
solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,”
as she called it, allows you to lose and then find yourself in the
rhythm of urban novelty and familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of
the hostess: the woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the
stairs, friendly to everyone, who grows only more mysterious with her
visibility. (One of the pleasures of throwing a party, Woolf showed, is
that it allows you to surprise yourself: surrounded by your friends, the
center of attention, you feel your separateness from the social world
you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends, lovers, and spouses
can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a core to their
personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their lives on
display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final redoubt
of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside.