Woolf: The Waves

There was a line that's been floating around the internet for a while that says that if you want to know who you truly are, you should take the average of the five people you spend the most time around.

But according to Virginia Woolf, the truth is more complicated even than this.

In Woolf's novel The Waves, we follow six friends from childhood to old age, and we dip in on various vignettes from their shared past: a school room, a dinner, a funeral, and so on. And by the end, the character Bernard argues that he is not just one person in one body, in one mind, but parts of him have been placed in other people, like pieces of a soul given to someone else.

There are two aspects to this. The first says that you cannot entirely be yourself on your own. You cannot see your own face. Who you are is found in what people say about you and in how people see you. And so, if somebody leaves your life, they take a part of you with them. When Bernard loses his friend Percival, he also loses the part of himself that existed only in Percival's company.

And so, there are many different kinds of grief. If we lose somebody we care about, we lose not only them, but we lose who we were with them. If you stop seeing your school friends, for example, you stop seeing who you were at school. When your last parent dies, the child version of you will die with them. You are now just an adult with adult relationships forever.

And so, we are not the average of five people. We are defined by who we give our lives to.