How we are intertwined with others (in Virginia Woolf's The Waves)

“I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains. A judge. That is, if I discover a new vein in myself I shall submit it to you privately. I shall ask, ‘What is your verdict?’ You shall remain the arbiter. But for how long? Thing will become too difficult to explain: there will be new things; already my son.” –Bernard p. 112

Here, we see Bernard worrying over forgetting Percival, and thus forgetting a part of himself. He wonders, “what form (their) communication will take,” after Percival’s death. However, his musings are more self-directed, rather than concern over Percival.

When he says that Percival has “gone across the court, further and further,” he means that Percival is not only somewhere that he cannot reach—taken by death—but that time is continuing to push Percival “further and further” away from him, his thoughts, and his memories, “drawing finer and finer the thread between (them).” As the “thread,” or their friendship, or fragile connection through communication, is drawn thinner and thinner, or least as Bernard predicts it will be, their friendship and what is left of it in Bernard’s mind will slowly but surely dwindle.

Bernard does, however, go on to say that Percival “(exists) somewhere” and that “something (of him) remains… a judge,” meaning that part of Percival exists in what Bernard judges would be “Percival” and Percival’s imagined actions and reactions to happenings. Bernard says Percival shall “remain arbiter” or judge, and even directly address him asking, “what is your verdict?”

But then he must ask himself, for “how long” can he continue reinventing his dead friend’s persona in his mind? For “how long” can he explain himself, see himself, and gather himself, in someone who is no longer living?

I think he already knows the answer to his own question, when he speaks of “new things,” implying new adventures and hardships to come in his life, and raising his son–an inevitably joyful yet complicated life experience. I think he already knows the answer to “how long” he can keep the deceased “Percival,” filtered through his own thoughts, as a judge against his own persona, when unable to “draw” upon the real, live Percival. It is not long at all, and was only somewhat more possible when Percival was alive.