Virginia Woolf's Insomnia January 1941 All my spectres come out on a sleepless night. Diary II   Night's a medieval carol--insular      and superstitious--head a white vapor, legs bent candles, the elms pulsing their red omens on the dark, dove-fastened      Downs. Look your last on all things lovely, back in the habitable world of day.      The new year's a closed door, she and Leonard cowering beneath dormers, German planes dragging their terrible,      crescendic scales up over Monk's House-- --never truly away--"We shall be broken together." Where once wine flashed      citrine and crimson in sceptered glasses, water speaks now on the wavering wall, as the Gods who must, when they have created      happiness, grudge it, and the voices of the dead begin, thin, milky, gnawing at the nape, one thing tunneling      into the next (ever writing to rhythm, not plot), as in London, visiting the bombed flat, she tasted in her mouth the blasted,      white dust of bricks that were her walls, carressing her grief with walking through the City's char and gash, exquisitely      wounded. Wind blows hungrily over the bed, the voices tune up in the pit--and pain, the first stage of intimacy, presides.      She craves a kiss--a whole flutter from the inner wrist to the elbow, the stumble of the warm stone of her own voice, singing out      ahead over the river's restless avenue that she cannot help but follow.