Best known for novels like Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando, Woolf was a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group and one of the most influential literary voices of the 20th century. She had a gift for transforming the ordinary into something profound—revealing, through the smallest gestures, her ongoing exploration of the unseen forces that shape consciousness and reality.

What begins as a scene in a London salon gradually opens onto something more uncertain, much like a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway. On the surface, everything appears composed — polite conversation, careful arrangements — but underneath, quieter forces are at work. Clarissa, like Woolf herself, moves through a labyrinth of memory, expectation, and the unspoken weight of passing time:

• The burden of past choices and unspoken desires.

• The roles woman are expected to perform.

• The subtle emotional currents between people—love, regret, alienation.

• The ever-present shadow of death, mirrored in the character of Septimus.

• The force of time itself, marked by the steady tolling of Big Ben.

In her portrait of Lady Ottoline Morrell, Woolf follows a similar path. What starts as a quiet, almost detached observation slowly reveals something more elusive — something touched by the strange and sacred.

She describes Lady Ottoline as ghostlike — “a disembodied spirit escaping from her world into a purer air.” But Ottoline never quite lands in that purer air. She hovers on the threshold, a glamourous outsider, the kind of person who makes everything around her feel more charged simply by not quite belonging.

“She is remarkable if not beautiful in her person. She takes the utmost pains to set off her beauty, as though it were a rare object, picked up, with the eye of a connoisseur, in some dusky Florentine back street. It always seems possible that the rich American connoisseurs, who finger her Persian wrapper, and pronounce it ‘very good,’ should go on to criticize her face; ‘a fine work — late renaissance, presumably; what modelling in the eyes and brow! — but the chin unfortunately is in the weaker style.”

Then comes the most striking image: Woolf compares her to “a cast from some marble Medusa.” The Medusa — that ancient figure whose gaze could turn men to stone, whose severed head adorned Athena’s shield — represents beauty, terror, and mystery all at once. In likening Ottoline to Medusa, Woolf suggests she contains power society can’t fully name — or dares not confront.

But Woolf reimagines the myth. Ottoline isn’t threatening; she’s still. Blank, pallid, passive — and yet not lifeless. That stillness, that strange detachment, makes her not a socialite but a kind of oracle. The artists who gather around her — “humbler creatures” who still have “a vision of the divine”— aren’t just mingling at a party. They’re responding to something they can’t name. “But when one has said that she has this taste for art and artists, one is puzzled to define her gifts any further.”

But there’s tension, too—Ottoline is rootless. She has fled her world but can’t quite take hold in another. She’s trapped in-between: admired, enigmatic, but never fully understood.

Woolf may be describing a woman, but there’s a quieter suggestion just beneath the surface — that the sacred doesn’t always arrive with fanfare. Sometimes it enters quietly, draped in silk, taking the form of a Thursday salon guest. And by the time it slips back into the night, we’re left wondering what, exactly, we experienced.

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Notes

At the end of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Dalloway doesn't undergo any dramatic external transformation—but something important happens internally. After a day of preparations, her elegant banquet is finally underway, attended by the London elite. But as she moves through the evening, she learns about the suicide of a young veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, through one of the guests.

This news deeply affects her, though she’s never met him. She retreats alone for a moment and reflects on his death. Rather than dismissing it, she sees his act as a kind of defiance—perhaps even a noble refusal to compromise. It shakes her into a moment of real existential clarity.

Ultimately, Clarissa returns to the party and re-enters the social world, but something has shifted. She seems more alive, more present, as if Septimus’s death has reminded her of what it means to really exist. So while not much happens on the outside, the ending marks a quiet but powerful moment of spiritual or psychological awakening.

In short: Clarissa Dalloway chooses life, say, gains wings—but with a deeper awareness of death.

This tragedy raises a disturbing question: Can one escape oppression by appealing to a higher power if that higher power is itself governed by survival?

Plato’s Republic offers a striking alternative to Ye Wenjie’s path. For Plato, salvation does not come from aligning with a superior race, but from the soul’s ascent toward the Good—an inner transformation so profound it reconnects the human spirit with consciousness—the wine of Dionysius—capable of generating entire dimensions and ecstatic flight. This vertical journey is metaphysical: the soul, rightly ordered, may break free into a realm that is wholly its own by the grace of God.

The deeper point, perhaps overlooked by many, is that the regime which imposes order can be as oppressive as the Cultural Revolution itself. The noble lie is false only in form, for the value it assigns to the soul’s metals is not innate but realized through the order imposed by the regime. Liu Cixin describes the same regime that “cut down the giants” is like a world saturated in pesticides—designed to eliminate threats, yet toxic to life itself. Ye Wenjie—and humanity—is caught between two brutal realities: on one side, a system that enforces order through moral absolutism; on the other, individuals like herself, shaped by scarcity and disillusionment, who fight each other to manipulate the system for survival and gain.

Ye Wenjie’s cry for help is horizontal. Rather than turning inward and upward, she looks outward—toward the giants—for rescue. Prince Deep Water—the fairy tales serve as a reflection on the broader story? But what she finds is not someone willing to help, only another species locked in struggle. Her cry reaches power, but not wisdom nor God. And perhaps this is precisely Liu Cixin’s point of the entire series? Embedded within the novel is a critique not only of failed utopias, but of a deeper human dilemma: material reality is marked by scarcity, and in clinging to it, we turn on one another—especially when the higher powers we appeal to offer not wisdom, but merely a new form of tyranny disguised as order.

But was there a reason for this scarcity? What if, in a time before order, there was a wild communion of magical beings—an unstructured world without lack? Was human life better then? Historically, Plato and others suggest the opposite. Before the rule of law, there was an age of wild communion—when gods and mortals mingled, when heroes strode the earth, when giants were real. All these—regardless of what the fantasies call them—are, in truth, beings defined by their higher consciousness. It was a world alive but unstable, luminous but dangerous. Then came disaster. In those ancient times, as the old writers tell it, abundance was not a blessing but a curse. When nothing was scarce, humanity lost its way. Because without wisdom, even a world of plenty becomes ruinous. It’s not more resources or distant powers we need—it’s wisdom and grace we must call upon, not spacefaring saviors. The giants were slain, the sky silenced, and in their place rose the Republic: structured, disciplined, rational—a cultural revolution cloaked in pesticides?

In the Book of Enoch, the Nephilim, giants born of divine beings and human women, become agents of corruption, bringing chains instead of winged flight. Plato’s dialogues echo this same caution. Emerging in the aftermath of the Trojan War, they reflect on an age when gods and mortals mingled freely, giving rise to heroes—giants in spirit, boys with wings, beings who crossed thresholds. But like the Nephilim, these offspring did not usher in peace. They brought chaos, war, and ruin. The ambition of the half-divine scorched the earth, and what followed was not emergence, but the need for restraint.

According to Plato’s mythic framework, this devastation necessitated a new order. Humanity, too dangerous in its original form, was divided—literally cut in half, as described in the Symposium, no longer whole, no longer divine. In response, two counsels were established to govern mankind. Together, these were meant to restrain the chaos born of unregulated power and restore balance between the human and the divine. Aristophanes' birds found their refuge high in the clouds.

But as the novel’s protagonist reflects in a metaphor about pesticides, even the most well-intentioned interventions can turn destructive. Is it truly virtuous to eliminate evil if, in doing so, we also poison the good? If, in trying to improve mankind—or the food we consume—we blanket everything in chemicals that sterilize life itself, have we not lost our way? The same question applies to the regime of “order” imposed after humanity’s fall from grace. If that order severs us from the divine, if it leaves us trapped in a world where we no longer know truth from illusion, spirit from matter, then what exactly have we preserved? A stable society, perhaps—but one haunted by disconnection. In seeking to restrain chaos, have we only exiled ourselves from God?

Liu’s novel is a modern retelling of this mistake: appealing to external, material power to heal a deeper moral wound. The Trisolarans, like the Nephilim or ancient kings, possess power without wisdom. They are not guided by truth, only by necessity. In turning to them, Ye Wenjie exchanges one form of tyranny—or prison—for another. Her disillusionment with humanity blinds her to the path that Plato, mystics, and even Christ pointed to: the path within. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Salvation does not come from the stars if the soul lacks wisdom?