Street Haunting: A London Bridge Adventure response (final)

This essay is about different people in the world and how other individuals percieve them. Without really ever knowing someone, one can always look at them from the outside with a positive perspective. "Passing, glimpsing, everything seems accidentally but miraculously sprinkled with beauty...with no though of b uying, the eye is sportive ang generous; it creates;it adorms; it enhances." We are only given a mere glimpse into indiviuals lives, the moments we spend with them are all we are left to know about them. "Into each of these lives one could pentrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others." We put a mask over the harsh realities of the world, like the homeless, and the blind, and the crippled, and try to tell ourselves that regardless of their true state, they in fact live a good life and they too have something to go home to each night. In this essay Woolf gives us these images and different types of people and she then chooses to create imagery and inferences of her own. When we pass an individual on the street the observer knows nothing more then what the common eye sees, yet in this essay Woolf is expressing the fact that we feel the need to cover up what their lives could be and paint them in a positive light in order to make ourselves feel better. In the end of the day, the most comforting thing to the individual is still themselves, and their home. While each "room is a new adventure," yet "still as we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round."