These extracts from the Between Two Silences libretto accompany the music currently in the Jukebox.  

These texts are reproduced for reference purposes only. The Libretto is copyright material:

© Copyright Carol S. Lashof, 2004. Please contact me for further details.

Texts

Track 1

VIRGINIA Things have gone wrong somehow . . . the war  . . . We wait for the knives to sharpen. It is gone now, the outer wall. No echo comes back to reassure us. I begin again to hear voices, wild, like water after the storm, roiled and grey. No echo comes back . . . all is wide and wild as the desert now. 

VW It is March 28th today; it’s nineteen hundred and forty-one.  Does that mean something? What does it mean? There is no winter, no spring . . .

VIRGINIA Why did our parents conceive us

VW No summer, no autumn, no . . .

VIRGINIA so we would see this particular stretch of time?

VW We pour to the edge of a precipice . . . and then?

 

Track 2

MRS. WOOLF (at her desk, composing a letter.) Dear Vita:  I wish I were Queen Victoria. Then I could thank you as you should be thanked for the rapture, for the glory . . .Never has anything tasted so good. Were I Queen Victoria, I would thank you from the depths of  my heart, from the profound depths of my grateful heart . . .(She puts down her pen.  Pause.) No. I can’t get the hang of the style. All I can say, all I can say is that when we discovered the butter . . .

VIRGINIA “That’s a whole pound of butter,” I said to Leonard. And I broke off a lump and I ate it pure. 

VW (To the audience.) I’m sure you no longer remember the taste of butter. So I’ll tell you what it’s like:  the taste of butter! It’s something like honey. It’s something like dew.

VIRGINIA There it was in the envelope box. I broke off a lump, and I ate it pure.

MRS. WOOLF Lord, Vita!  Please congratulate the cows from us, and the dairymaid, and may I propose, if the calf is a male, that he be known as Leonard. And if it’s a girl may she be called ever onward: Virginia.

ALL I can’t break off this rhapsody, for it’s more than a year since I saw a whole pound of butter. Nothing else seems to matter. Yes, our house in London was bombed. Tomorrow our books will come to us here, all mildewed and battered. Yes, I’ve been made the Treasurer of the Institute of Women.

Bombs fall near me. Trifles.A plane shot down on the marsh. Trifles. Floods. No, nothing seems to make a wreath on the pedestal fitting your butter.

 

Track 3

MRS. WOOLF When I was a child, these shocks, these moments of being, often left me in despair. VIRGINIA My brother Thoby and I were fighting. I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why hurt another person? I dropped my hand and stood there and let him pommel me. 

VW And then there was the moment of the puddle in the path,

VIRGINIA When for no reason

VW No reason I could discover, everything

VIRGINIA became unreal; I was suspended. I tried to touch something . . .

VW I was suspended. Everything became unreal.

VIRGINIA That evening, I huddle at my end of the bath, silent, motionless. I say nothing, not even to Nessa,

VW I felt as if I had been struck by some sledge hammer blow; I felt exposed and passive below an avalanche of meaning, and I had nothing to ward off the blow.

VIRGINIA That night I lay awake longing for Mother to come. She told me to think of  all

MRS. WOOLF the lovely things . . . of summer at St. Ives, and of the waves that break against the shore.

VW I remember lying in bed in the nursery at St. Ives;

VIRGINIA I was half asleep, half awake, hearing the sound of the waves break, one, two, sending a splash, one, two, of water across the shore and then breaking, one, two, behind a yellow blind; the wind pushing a leaf across the floor.

VW If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills— then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory:

VIRGINIA of lying and hearing this splash and seeing this light and feeling: it is almost impossible that I should be here.

VW May 5th, 1895: our childhood world stopped. 

VIRGINIA I leaned out the nursery window. It was a beautiful morning, about six, I suppose, very still, very blue. I saw the doctor walk away. I saw the pigeons float and settle.Everything had come to an end.

 

 

Track 4

MRS. WOOLF The characters of Mother and Father are at the centre of To the Lighthouse. The is Father in a boat, reciting, "We perished each alone" as he crushes a dying mackerel.