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he Germans were over this house last night encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the 5
Tand the night before that. Here they are head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this
again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark futile activity of idea-making? Because there are
and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which other tables besides officer tables and section three
may at any moment sting you to death. It is a conference tables. Are we not leaving the young
sound that interrupts cool and consecutive Englishman without a weapon that might be of
thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound — far value to him if we give up private thinking, /
more than prayers and anthems — that should tea-table thinking, because it seems useless? Are
compel one to think about peace. Unless we can we not stressing our disability because our Virginia Woolf
think peace into existence we — not this one ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to
body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to contempt? “I will not cease from mental fight,”
be born — will lie in the same darkness and Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against
hear the same death rattle overhead. Let us the current, not with it.
think what we can do to create the only efficient That current flows fast and furious. It issues in
air-raid shelter while the guns on the hill go pop a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the
pop pop and the searchlights finger the clouds politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free
and now and then, sometimes close at hand, people, fighting to defend freedom. That is the
sometimes far away, a bomb drops.
Up there in the sky young Englishmen and
young German men are fighting each other.
The efenders are men, the attackers men.
Arms are not given to Englishwomen either to
fight the enemy or to defend herself. She must
lie weaponless tonight. Yet if she believes that
the fight going on up in the sky is a fight by the
English to protect freedom, by the Germans to
destroy freedom, she must fight, so far as she
can, on the side of the English. How far can she
fight for freedom without firearms? By making
arms, or clothes or food. But there is another “Women of Britain Come into the Factories”, propaganda poster, c.1940 (litho) English School,
way of fighting for freedom without arms: we
can fight with the mind. We can make ideas (20th century) / English. The StapletonCollection/Bridgeman Images
that will help the young Englishman who
is fighting up in the sky to defeat the enemy.
But to make ideas effective, we must be able
to fire them off. We must put them into action.
And the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet
in the mind. There was one zooming in The
Times this morning — a woman’s voice saying,
“Women have not a word to say in politics.” This is a British propaganda poster from World
There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any War II targeted to women.
Based on what you’ve read, to what extent
responsible post. All the idea-makers who are in would Woolf agree or disagree with its
a position to make ideas effective are men. That message?
is a thought that damps thinking, and
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