The Mark on the Wall

‘A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs…. How peaceful it is down here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections–if it were not for Whitaker's Almanack–if it were not for the Table of Precedency!’

— Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’, Monday or Tuesday