Being amphibious. “Never be unseated by the shying of that undependable brute, life, hag-ridden as she is by my own queer, difficult nervous system… I am writing this partly to test my poor bunch of nerves at the back of my neck – will they hold or give again, as they have done so often – for I’m amphibious still, in bed and out of it: partly to glut my itch (‘glut’ an ‘itch’!) for writing. It is the great solace and scourge.” (Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 86)