“Virginia Woolf” Words and music by Emily Saliers ; from the Indigo Girls album Rites of Passage (1992)
Some will strut and some will fret, see this an hour on the stage
Others will not but they’ll sweat in their hopelessness, in their rage.
We’re all the same, the men of anger and the women of the page.
They published your diary and that’s how I got to know you
Key to the room of your own and a mind without end.
Here’s a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time
The voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend
So I know I’m all right, my life will come, my life will go
Still I feel it’s all right, I just got a letter to my soul
When my whole life is on the tip of my tongue,
Empty pages for the no longer young
The apathy of time laughs in my face
You say each life has it’s place
The hatches were battened, thunderclouds rolled and the critics stormed
Battles surrounded the white flag of your youth
But if you need to know that you weathered the storm of cruel mortality
A hundred years later I’m sitting here living proof
So you know it’s all right, your life will come, your life will go
Still you’ll feel it’s all right, someone will get a letter to your soul
When your whole life was on the tip of your tongue
Empty pages for the no longer young
The apathy of time laughed in your face
Did you hear me say each life has its place.
The place where you hold me is dark in a pocket of truth
The moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth
And so it was for you when the river eclipsed your life
But sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me and it was my rebirth
So we know it’s all right, life will come and life will go
Still we know it’s all right, someone will get a message to your soul
Then you know it’s all right
(when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue, empty pages for the no longer young)
Then you know it’s all right and you feel it’s all right
(each life has its place, you say each life has its place)
It’s all right
The song was inspired by the following passage from Woolf’s diary, written upon witnessing a total eclipse of the sun in 1927:
“Then –it was over till 1999. What remained was the sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light, and colour. . . . Yet when it became established all over the country, one rather missed the sense of its being a relief and a respite, which one had had when it came back after the darkness.” (Thursday, June 30, 1927)
Virginia Woolf seminar, University of Alabama, Huntsville, [Created June 30, 1997; Updated June 30, 1997]
April 12, 2021 at 2:05 am
What an unusual song, I have know of the indigo girls for a long time but never listened to them before. Very impressive. 💜
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April 12, 2021 at 5:23 am
The indigo girls have been my “go-to” music for years. I’m not as familiar with their albums after about the early-mid 1990s. They are one of the folks who write/sing the soundtrack of my life.
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April 12, 2021 at 7:13 am
I know what you mean, I feel the same about Alanis Morrisette and Imogen Heap 💜
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