After the Day of the Day of the Moon, there comes the Day of Mars, the Day of War. What makes days different renders them equal. Every day, a motive, a journey; every era, the same. When every life is changing, evrey life is the same.

Allow me to be a bit enigmatic for the while it will take you to read these five or six lines. There is a story which never leaves me; it haunts me. And it haunts me for two reasons: first, it took me four readings to understand it the first time I read it twenty years ago, and this is the only time something similar has happened to me; and second, it is the first story I read by this author, who had come to be one of my favorite fiction writers on earth.

Here's the Story:

Transcription of "Monday or Tuesday"by Virginia Woolf (1921) - Personal Archive

Portrait of Virginia Woolf in 1902, by George Charles Beresford - Image in the Public Domain

Where to Find “Monday or Tuesday”?

“Monday or Tuesday” is the eponymous short story in the collection by British author Adeline Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf. The book was published by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. in New York, 1921.

Three hundred and three words in six paragraphs. That long—or short—is this short story:
A heron has taken off on his customary flight, supposedly on a random Monday. During his journey (for the narrator refers to it as he), he watches his surroundings, first from the high as he soars the sky to gradually get closer and closer to the ground, which allows him to peep into the intimacy of a home without, however, getting to know the truth he seems to be looking for. By the end of the story, we readers should guess this is a drill and will happen the next day: Tuesday (and ad eternum). The text can be read as a metaphor of the long discussed human impossibility to get to know reality (e.g. any object of scientific study); no matter how close we get to it (reality), given to a changeability factor introduced by the passing of time, and thus our own happening, we are left to make ourselves content with poetic representations of the world through words and our contemplation of the whole (the world itself and its multiple representations).

Like all the stories in the collection Monday or Tuesday, the tone is primarily reflexive, although thanks to the beauty of the descriptions, the apparent distortions of reality performed by means of the tricky game of perspective (provided by the heron’s approach) and blended in an aesthetic strategy of stream of consciousness, we can tease out the poetic tone, which reaches the melancholic (more palpable in “The Mark on the Wall,” for instance, the last short story of the collection.

The author of unique works as A Room of One’s Own, The Waves and Orlando presents us with a text as brief as complex, besides being clearly metafictional: given it discusses topics as the perception of reality and the multiple options to represent such perception through words, i.e. through fiction.

Image credits: Portrait of Virginia Woolf in 1902, by George Charles Beresford - Image in the Public Domain

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