Woolf and the mark

'The Mark on the Wall' is by Virginia Woolf, the English novelist and essayist. She grew up in her father's large library; the Bloomsbury Group of writers and thinkers met in her home; and with her husband she founded the Hogarth Press.

Woolf believed that our experience flows like a stream, not in a straight line, and she tried to capture that flow of thought in her writing.

The piece begins with her trying to remember when she first saw the mark. She dates it by small details: the fire burning, the yellow light on her book, three chrysanthemums in a bowl, and the cigarette she was smoking.

The mark is small, round and black, on the white wall. It interrupts an old childhood fancy she was having, of a red flag and knights.

Her thoughts swarm over it like ants carrying a blade of straw. Was it a nail, for hanging a miniature portrait? That leads her to think of the house's former owners, glimpsed and then lost, like people seen from a moving train.