In the second section of her modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf documents the slow decay of the Ramsay family’s abandoned holiday home during the course of the First World War, a decay that unfolds imperceptibly in its cold solitariness. Both unseen and unheard, the slow deterioration takes on its own temporal and spatial dynamics:

In this section, entitled ‘Time Passes’, the so-called march of time is visible and measurable only in terms of a vacated and exilic space along with its disintegrating objects: rhythms of sounds and silences, slumber, sleep and waking, the returning movement of the sun on the roses of the wallpaper and catching the folds of the dust-ridden, long-forgotten shawl. Whilst outside in the world at large time is measured in battles and bloodshed, in winning and losing and, ultimately, in living or dying, within this abandoned domestic space, it is all but invisible; in the words of Henri Lefebvre:

Here, Lefebvre could well be writing about Woolf’s configuration of a now that incorporates a lost past, a meaningless present and a hopeless future all swept up in the materiality of a left domestic space from which the world is now exiled: for Lefebvre, time finds itself ‘inscribed in space’, and, in turn, space becomes ‘the lyrical and tragic script of natural time’.