[Vwoolf] shoes

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

And then there is Mr Ramsay, tying Lily's shoe-laces and she praising his boots ...

I remember reading that those exploring the wreck of the Titanic discovered shoes, in pairs, on the sea-bed. The bodies of their owners had decayed away, but shoes, as a result of the tanning process, survived.

A pair of shoes is immensely personal: we do not generally share shoes, and their design tells us something about the taste of their owner. The piles of bodies discovered in liberated concentration camps convey little about the victims' individuality, but I remember looking at a pile of shoes preserved in the Majdanek camp and feeling overwhelmed by the sense they gave of individual owners, each a precious and irreplaceable life, each pair bearing witness to an choice made by someone for themselves or for another.

There are actually more shoes in JR. An electronic search throws up Fanny Elmer's silver-buckled shoes and her shoes with red tassels, Bonamy's "amazement at an
existence squeezed and emasculated within a white satin shoe," and unfortunate Julia who leaves her shoe laces untied (no Mr Ramsay to come to her aid, alas).

Jakob's shoes are mentioned twice before the two final lines of the novel. "The light drenched Jacob from head to toe. You could see the pattern on
his trousers; the old thorns on his stick; his shoe laces; bare hands; and face." "And what I should like would be to get out among the fields,
sit down and hear the grasshoppers, and take up a handful of earth - Italian earth, as this is Italian dust upon my shoes."

Jeremy H
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