It is the climate [in England] that is impossible. If we try to think of Sophocles here, we must annihilate the smoke and the damp and the thick wet mists. We must sharpen the lines of the hills. We must imagine a beauty of stone and earth rather than of woods and greenery. With warmth and sunshine and months of brilliant, fine weather, life of course is instantly changed; it is transacted out of doors, with the result, known to all who visit Italy, that small incidents are debated in the street, not in the sitting-room, and become dramatic; make people voluble; inspire in them that sneering, laughing, nimbleness of wit and tongue peculiar to the Southern races, which has nothing in common with the slow reserve, the low half-tones, the brooding introspective melancholy of people accustomed to live more than half the year indoors.
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from “On Not Knowing Greek” in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
The photograph accompanying this piece is not of Virginia Woolf but of Elizabeth Taylor in the movie Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
from the archive; first posted March 2018
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Author: The Best American Poetry
