some will a strut and some will fret
see this an hour on this stage
others will not but they’ll sweat
in their hopelessness in their rage
we’re all the same
the men of anger
and the women of the page

they published your diary
and that’s how i got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
and here’s a young girl
on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long lost friend

so i know i’m alright
my life will come my life will go
still i feel it’s alright
i just got a letter to my soul
when my whole life is on the tip of my tongue
empty pages for the no longer young
the apathy of time laughs in my face
you say
each life has its place

From Virginia Woolf, by the Indigo Girls (Rites of Passage album).

This version of the lyrics is from the rites of passage CD liner notes, only with line breaks.

the place where you hold me
is dark in a pocket of truth
the moon has swallowed the sun and the light of the earth
and so it was for you
when the river eclipsed your life
but sent your soul like a message in a bottle to me
and it was my rebirth

so we know we’re alright
life will come and life will go
still we know it’s alright
someone’ll get a message to your soul

The song stunned me when I first heard it because it so perfectly captured how I felt when I discovered Woolf’s diaries. (Her novels otoh — I should probably reread them now. I read them in college because one was supposed to, and didn’t really warm to them. Perhaps I was too young.)

I wonder if she came to realize, at the end, that her gifts could not substitute for a belief in deservedness . . . nor earn it.