“The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the
wallpaper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out on his feet, looking
at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm place,
this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a wood sometimes in
the evening, when, because of a fall in the ground, or some arrangement of the
trees…warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek like the wings of a
bird…her sentence bubbled away…like a contented tap left running.” (144)
During the brief moment when Septimus sees only the products
of reality, Septimus takes notice of the dancing of the sunlight in the room.
Sunlight is usually something that most people take for granted—we see and feel
its effects but don’t think twice about it until the room is dark and cold
again for the night. After not being able to see the purity of ubiquitous
sunlight through the haze of his hallucinations, even the simplest things are
able to content his battered soul.
Septimus is a character that brings new light (ha-pun) to
the book. Unlike other cliché characters from other novels who have a hard time
dealing with reality, Septimus has a hard time finding reality again. His comfort
in anything “so real…so substantial”, even something as simple as Mrs. Peters’
hat and the warmth of the sun’s rays is a sense of comfort to him. Because Septimus
lives in the limbo between reality and his hallucinations, he constantly feels
trapped between the two. Bradshaw proposes to place him in an institution where
now he is not only mentally trapped but physically too. At the time, “the air
buffets the cheek like the wings of a bird.” The bird parallels Septimus, who
is able to fly freely for just a short period of time, similar to how Septimus
was lucid for even just a a brief period.
