The Thread of Time

This summer, I spent two days by the Aegean Sea with a close childhood friend I’d studied with through middle and high school, whom I hadn’t seen in years. It was surprising for both of us—as if we had jumped through time, still seventeen years old, watching two women on the cusp of turning forty as if from a dream. We marveled at how the years had passed, how far removed we were from our younger selves, yet how vividly those memories remained alive in our minds. We talked extensively about old memories and life itself. Since I sometimes read from my diaries to her, we laughed recalling some youthful dreams and secrets recorded there. The greatest dream born from being passionately devoted to literature in youth is the expectation that a romantic, epic life—like those in the books—awaits us. Yet, early youth often consists of long, desolate waiting; neither the great events we imagined arrive, nor does time seem eager to flow.

I have kept a diary for as long as I can remember. Life has never been something that simply flows for me, something I could passively be carried along by. From the moment I learned to write, I needed writing to make sense of my experiences. By writing down what happened each day and retelling it to myself, it felt as though I truly lived that day. One of the most magical aspects of journaling is the ability to access your younger self whenever you wish. On those pages, I am seven years old, arguing with my school bus friend; or laughing at humorous sketches from the show Olacak O Kadar. Then I grow older—friendships, loves, school, books, exams come and go. My writings become more abstract, capturing my search for meaning, books, films, and explorations of what love truly is. When I turned twenty, I wrote about the “last minutes of my teenage years,” pages stained with tears as I grasped the speed at which time moves. Did I record these moments because I was always so conscious of time, or did I become so curious about time because I wrote my life’s fragments into diaries? I do not know the answer.

A writer friend whose judgment I trust once observed that I often evoke the past in my writings. I looked back and saw he was right. But this was no unique trait of mine. When I began to reflect on this, I realized that I rarely stayed fully present even during the day; almost every step I took summoned memories from the past. It seems that every morning when I wake, I place the past like a crown upon my head and live in a constant state of recollection and flux. As I pondered this, Samuel Beckett’s reflections on Proust came to mind: we cannot escape yesterday, because just as yesterday deforms us, we also deform it; yesterday changes us and remains lodged within us as a dangerous fragment. Like the memories etched in my diaries, the past continually moves, renewing itself, recreating both itself and me with each passing day.

Amid these reflections, I learned that Marguerite Yourcenar translated Woolf’s The Waves into French, prompting me to revisit the book. My initial aim was to compare translations, but I soon lost myself in the text. The carefully woven language, the subtle nuances unique to English, drew me in completely. I had no choice but to focus wholly on the text itself. The Waves narrates the story of seven friends. The seventh, Percival, is only known through the thoughts of the others; he dies young. The chapters open with interludes depicting the waves and the changing light of the sun over the course of a day. Each character’s inner voice reveals more of their thoughts than events. On the surface, almost “nothing” seems to happen, yet the entire depth of existence is contained within. We track the friends from middle school into old age, bearing witness to life itself. The conversations are unlike ordinary daily talk; the characters do not easily take tangible shape in our minds, but the overarching themes of birth, friendship, growth, and death unfold vividly throughout the novel.

As I immersed myself in the text, I found myself repeatedly surprised. It has always been more significant to me not what happens, but how we perceive life, how we think about time and events—and in The Waves I delighted in finding a similar understanding. The novel flows through experience in the mind rather than through plot. Woolf created a garden where everything existed in near divine harmony, and I sat in a garden where flowers bloomed by chance, reading the book. Such moments may seem ordinary, but to me they are strikingly profound.

Moved by the text, I began to think deeper about the book. I wondered at what age Virginia Woolf wrote it: she was forty-nine. Her diaries and essays in Moments of Being mention The Waves and the thoughts behind it. This year I turn forty, and I find myself rolling within the finely woven literary fabric Woolf spun shortly before turning fifty—the full expression of her Virginia Woolf-ness. The text reminded me of tightly-knit textiles; Woolf selected every word with care, knitting strong stitches. According to Woolf, she wrote the novel not following a plot but according to rhythm. Nurdan Gürbilek’s commentary on Woolf’s fascination with weaving was no coincidence. I also learned that the roots of the words “textile” and “text” are the same.

The Waves offers profound insights into existence—not simply Woolf’s or mine, but a general understanding of being. When we read great books in youth, we may miss the wisdom conveyed through a lifetime of experience. Hearing Woolf’s genius at my age, I was affected differently. The characters respond to the present moment of flux only through a selfhood shaped by past contributions. Remembering and time are the essential raw materials in The Waves. Woolf expresses the conclusions she arrived at in Moments of Being through characters like Neville and Bernard, filtering them through a literary lens.

Among the most startling realizations during those two days with my childhood friend was this: the memories we carry need not be grand; while our shared memories include remarkable events, they were not recalled with the same vividness. The small, joyful moments—the two lovely days we spent together in high school, the brief, seemingly ordinary school memories—were as vital to our memory as great adventures. As we talked, we realized that even during times we thought we were waiting for life, life had been asserting itself upon us. Woolf was right.

Woolf recounts in her diaries how intensely she devoted all her resources to writing The Waves, struggling so much that she had no energy left for anything else at night. Countless academic readings have analyzed The Waves with Heideggerian, Buddhist, and even Beethoven-inspired structural parallels. This variety reveals the richness of the novel’s understanding of time and rhythm.

I also believe The Waves invites numerous interpretations. Woolf’s immense wisdom, the power of her language, and her complete devotion to her craft warrant profound respect. In Moments of Being, she explicitly explores memory, an epiphany for me. Some of our thoughts run parallel—like this passage, for example:

“I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea time, despite the day’s goodness, this goodness was wrapped in a soft fabric difficult to describe. This is always the case. Most of each day is not consciously lived. People walk, eat, see things, mind their chores: the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering food; cooking dinner; bookbinding… On a bad day, the percentage of not-being is higher. A true novelist can somehow convey both being and not-being. I think Jane Austen can do that, maybe Dickens and Tolstoy. But I have never been able to do both myself. I tried—in Night and Day and The Years. But for now I am putting the literary side aside.”

What Woolf succeeded in The Waves was precisely this. Using time’s thread, she wove a book from the same fabric as life itself. The ability to convey life’s flow and the passing of years in a written masterpiece. The author likens meaningful and meaningless moments—those when we are aware and unaware—to cotton threads. Yet, these fibers do not float independently; behind them lie strong patterns. The great writer tells us that the quest for meaning is precisely to discover that pattern. Transforming the seemingly insignificant events of daily life into literature was already at the heart of literary modernism. Mrs. Dalloway would simply buy the flowers herself—no more than that.

Last year, in an interview with Şavkar Altınel, I asked a question, and with his usual eloquence he replied: “Larkin writes in a letter to one of his lovers, ‘The passage of time and the approach and arrival of death seem to me the most unforgettable things about our lives.’ I don’t guess I need to say I entirely agree. What I cannot understand is why everyone isn’t constantly writing about this.”

Woolf does exactly that, capturing this most unforgettable aspect with magnificent literary skill. A passage in The Waves that I especially love reads:

“‘Why look,’ said Neville, ‘at the ticking clock on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. We age. But sitting here with you, just you, here in London, in this fire-lit room—you there, me here—this is everything. Yet when you come, everything changes. (…)

This morning when you arrived, cups and plates changed. Pushing aside the newspaper, I thought our shabby lives, unpleasant for their many faults, cannot be doubted to be clothed in grandeur; only under love’s gaze do they gain meaning.’”

In this passage, Woolf stitches a tiny but strong moment into the great unstoppable flow of time. Through Neville’s eyes, though the clock ticks inexorably, the true essence is the present moment—the intimate bond formed in a single room that can hold the entire passage of time. You and I sitting in a room, that’s everything. I am grateful to have lived enough to understand what this means when I read it.

Reflecting on these thoughts in my journal after my two days with my childhood friend, I realized Woolf was telling us that the moments we remember are moments of being, flowing alongside daily life. That’s why, listening to my favorite songs on my headphones while walking from Galata to Karaköy, enjoying the exuberance of music against the Istanbul skyline on a mild autumn morning, I can relive that moment with the same clarity twenty years later. Writing defines the relationship between moments of being and not-being; some moments exist only because they are recorded. Woolf said this too: one can be happy with ordinary moments and create masterpieces by writing them. Life consists of these moments, and understanding this changes how I live.

I write this on a hot August day by the Aegean Sea I have known for forty years, watching the waves. The sun, the sea, and the waves remain the same. What changes by spinning them is me. The waves break on the shore.

 

Kaynakça: 

Woolf Virginia, Dalgalar,  Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2016 (T. Cansunar, Çev.)

Woolf Virginia, V. (2022). Varolma anları 1: Bütün eserleri 8 (İ. Özdemir, Çev.). Kırmızı Kedi Yayınevi. (Özgün eser: Moments of Being)

Woolf, Virginia. Moments of Being. Edited with an introduction and notes by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

kitap-lık, Sayı 232, Mart–Nisan 2024.

Gürbilek, Nurdan. Örme Biçimleri: Bir Ters Bir Düz Fragmanlar. Metis Yayınları, 2023.

Olson, Liesl M. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Cotton Wool of Daily Life.’” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 26, no. 2, 2003, pp. 42–65. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831894. Accessed 11 Sept. 2025.

 

Woolf, V. (1993). Les vagues (M. Yourcenar, Trans. & Pref.). Librairie Générale Française. (Original work published 1931)

Beckett, Samuel. Proust. Édith Fournier. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990. (Elektronik baskı: 2013).