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The New Dress

Virginia Woolf is best known for her ability to delve into her characters’ stream of consciousness in the plot’s real-time.

In “The New Dress,” the protagonist, Mabel questions her reasons for being at that posh party.  Towards the end, Mabel makes this comment, “We are all like flies trying to crawl over the edge of the saucer…”  Flies.  There was an instance when a group of us were called flies, for reasons I am not sure of.  But when Mabel compared us to flies trying desperately to scamper to the edge of the saucer, it dawned on me how weak some of us are.  We are so drawn to many “sugary” things.  The bad thing about that is most of these “sugary” things come with preservatives and additives – an escapism into a temporal realm of relief. 

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like a wild boar lurking around a tourist infested beach

(photo taken by my brother last January when we went Island Hopping)

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