Jeremy Corbyn, Virginia Woolf, and Time for Reflection

Corbyn's Labour Party was trounced in recent elections. As the scale of the shellacking began to set in, the Labour leader announced a "process of reflection", with #PeriodOfReflection going viral. The Guardian's John Harris explores the need for a break from the viral vortex of our online lives, for periods of calm and introspection.

And I was reminded of a review by Aida Edemariam of a new collection of essays by Virginia Woolf on 'how to read' that appeared in the same paper one day earlier. The following passage struck me as particularly relevant to our times (to all times, really):
 
--- And her (Woolf's) bravura, and funny trashing of almost all Elizabethan plays bar Shakespeare, in language that reflects their pile-ups of hectic incident. What does for the plays in the end is not their woeful characterisation and risible plots but their utter lack of solitude and silence – the unmistakable cri de coeur of the novelist, which she had by then (1925, the year Mrs Dalloway appeared) emphatically become.

"Pile-ups of hectic incident." 

Sounds familiar.