Che gioia, che terrore

'What a lark, what a plunge' is Clarissa Dalloway's first thought when she leaves home.
Woolf, with astonishing precision, describes a temperament, a predisposition to life, that she feels is inherent to her.
It is an acute hypersensitivity, an adhesive and indissoluble connection with every nuance of being, like the absence of a separation between the material world, the world of thought and the self as a distinct person. A perceptual and analytical, visceral fusion with every person, every environment, every dream, idea, or liveable experience.
This accentuated 'being here' necessarily leads to what joy, what terror: the condition of the sensitive Woolfian is a perpetual balance between ecstasy and fear, as if the thinned boundary between the mind and what surrounds us leads to experiencing everything with an amplified intensity, which, on the one hand, imbues every moment with an almost existential, moving and inexplicable nuance of meaning, and on the other, leads to constant apprehension, foreboding, the fear of losing oneself in this magnificent and tumultuous river that is life.