Street life - Room with a view

I am being haunted by one of literature's more pertinent question: But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction - what, has that got to do with a room of one's own? When I was more kid than I am now, and time's jaw yawned in a very distant chasm, I dismissed the question, never gave it a second's thought, well, I said, dear old Virginia was born before her time. Her question, I thought, was no longer relevant, and as she had predicted in her essay, charwomen now drove engines, everything is possible...

As I sit now, in the room I call my own, looking out of the window onto the world outside, seeking to find a connection between the inner world and the outer one, watching it change, jotting down the flutters and the flickers, I see how fundamentally important it is to have a room of one's own, if you want to do something with your life that goes against the grain of our rapid progressive consuming society.

In this room of my own I have revisited Virginia Woolf's essay, and I see that she argues chiefly about the role of women in literature or rather their slim contributions, the evident void. Perhaps she couldn't see that no matter how advanced society becomes, no matter how equal we sexes are, it is still extremely difficult to have a room of one's own. Viriginia Woolf was lucky enough to receive an income from a deceased aunt, and so she was justifying, I think, her decision to shy away from maternal duties and focus singularly on her own maundering, cultivating her wilderness into refined literary journeys that sit outside of time.

And so, it remains impossible for me to imagine anyone attempting to write a novel or a collection of poems, or paint a canvas with full concentration unless there is a room of one's own, regardless of sex. Perhaps it is even more important than the income, money comes and goes, but a room of one's own is a playground for your brain children, if of course, you decide to have any... perhaps Virginia's anger blinded her from seeing that the process of writing and isolation for the production of work (good, mediocre or otherwise) is a difficult one for men and women alike, turning their back on a machinating world which seeks to consume and devour you whole in exhange for a cheque at the end of the month...

Marcel Proust allegedly lived in a cork-lined room with the windows permanently shut.

I worked for a Croatian script-writer who insisted on keeping the shutters closed and lighting candles in the room for atmospheric enhancement (or maybe he just wanted to block out the chaos and dirt of the room). In the sun-filled room of my own, with a bright Tanzanian mural on the side of a building outside, I open the window and hang out, I hear the children playing and laughing, I hear the drilling of the roads, the distant whirr of the trains, I watch the bicycles whiz by, the old ladies stumbling to the green grocers on Istedgade, and I feel privileged to have this room, and I cannot imagine living in a cork-lined room with no light, and I like to imagine that Virginia Woolf's room was bright, and sun-filled and high up over the rooftops of London where she could smoke and think and write to her heart's content without ever looking up once to dust the mantelpiece or pay an electricity bill, childishly dreaming about better days that will not roll by again...

She comments in her essay on Tennyson and Christina Rossetti: The illusion... is far rarer now than then. And she continues with her acerbic tongue, why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place.

For in her attempts to define women and literature, her meanders take us on wonderful detours, because she sat in her room and created a private space for the ink to flow, in between her feminism and anger there are exquisite nuggets, that I have had the privilege to reread: ...The beauty of the world is soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

The day has slipped away unnoticed. There is a new chair in the room, dragged through the streets and up the stairs, it is a reading chair in pea-green velour, it is ugly but charming. It is empty now, ready to be occupied for some star-gazing... but as with all good things, I must leave this room and go to a kitchen to cook, something far more banal, and having had quite enough of my cogitations, I will happily switch on the radio and listen to some smooth Nordic blues as I chop leeks with gusto, imagining them to be the CEOs of Multinational corporations.