I didn’t plan to be reading a classic by Virginia Woolf and a biography of Alexander Hamilton at the same time.

Both books had been watching me for a while; I received three of Woolf’s novels for my seventeenth birthday, none of which I had the emotional or intellectual capacity for in my last years of high school. They sat squashed on my bookshelf for three years, and I studied their spines to stop myself from revising for exams as I went to sleep.

I once read an article about how it’s beneficial to be surrounded by books that you have yet to read. The comfort of potential, unknown knowledge. Writing for The Guardian, Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield describes these literary worlds to be discovered as an antidote to our “frantic, goal-obsessed, myopic time” in which “everything undertaken has to have a purpose, outcome or a destination, or it’s invalid”. It essentially slows time by withholding the future, keeping it just out of reach.

Scrolling through the twitter feed of Lin-Manuel Miranda (LMM), whose virtual warmth I find to be the only reason to open the platform, I found a quote that felt like bubbles in champagne, golden joy in an otherwise fluorescent white, empty interface: “No need to sparkle, no need to shine, no need to be anything but one’s self.” A quick search revealed the author, and I turned around to see her name not on my phone, but right there, printed on my bookshelf. Time to join the canon so many have already found.

I was initially struck by Woolf’s imagery and language, playing with the idea of fiction and bending reality through ambiguity of tense. She gave the river agency. It “reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree,” viewing water as life, capable of choosing how we interact with it, and what we see within it.

She wrote about how all women live in poverty. I thought about intersectionality. Where would Woolf be today? How would she respond to our world where women still struggle, but not all in the same ways, and with so many other layers of marginalisation? After all, A Room of One’s Own was first published in 1928—after women’s suffrage, but well before later developments in feminism.

My edition is very small, A6, and I like to think of it as a feminist manifesto. It’s a soft dark grey, hardback bound, with some sort of geometric pattern in light green panels around the cover. There’s a square grid with lines of different thicknesses, and shark fin or tooth mark or architectural symbols etched into each square. Maybe it’s about letting oneself in; or being sharp, defensive and assertive; or bringing light into the rigidity of life while being careful not to obscure the depths from which our society is built. Maybe it’s just some lines.

For its size, it’s very dense. Woolf tells stories as though she’s at a party, with references to ancient and contemporary texts in a scholarly, enraptured, energetic style. She expresses her disbelief that women were forbidden from university, demonstrating that wit and intelligence have no gender.

It reminds me to be grateful for the opportunities presented to me almost 100 years on and on the other side of the world. I am simultaneously frustrated by this thought, that my education is a privilege, when really, it shouldn’t be. Imagine a world where learning was a right, for everyone—how far we would collectively be able to move.

So I started A Room of One’s Own but I also kept checking on LMM, seeing how his son was doing, watching him dance on an empty subway in New York and kind of wishing I was there, but not really. It’s very nice to be at home.

As a long-standing Hamilton fan, I’ve been curious about the biography that inspired his show for some years. Ron Chernow’s biography of Hamilton begins at the end, with his wife Eliza Hamilton in her final years, caring so deeply for her husband who died almost 50 years prior. Implying the significance of Eliza in Alexander’s life, Chernow’s decision also seems to be an effort to establish Hamilton as a beloved family man. His family’s history, going back to his great-grandparents, is told in great detail. But as his life continues to unfold, it’s hard to maintain an emotional attachment to the prodigious writer, who, for example, detailed lists of the characteristics of his ideal wife such as “wealthy, but not interested in money”.

I have never quite understood the argument to be had of ‘other times’ and ‘judging history by today’s standards’. Surely the whole purpose (or at least, a key purpose) of learning history and analysing texts from the past is to learn how challenges were met (or not), and the journey through which they were overcome to give way to the present. Then, ideally, we can continue to move forward, develop, and grow. If we ignore the immorality ingrained in societies built around owning people as slaves, commodifying women, and erasing First Nations narratives, we reach a dangerous juncture in time. By giving a ‘history pass’ to the past, we stumble past healing, and forget the ongoing ramifications of these (in many ways ongoing) systematic and institutionalised forms of injustice.

But regardless—Hamilton was complex in nature, fighting for abolition and holding his sister-in-law’s political views in high regard. At what point is one judged for how they interact in a society they are conditioned (or rather, socialised) to take part in? How will we both confront the discriminatory structures of our time and also accept that much of our frameworks for living come from the same institutions that support these ideas?

I returned to Woolf. She wrote “dogs will bark; people will interrupt; money must be made; health will break down.” I thought about how the very structure of her sentences are surprising. They’re rhythmic, object-focussed phrases, comprising a world of organised, mechanical business.

So we return to Schofield’s slowing down of time through the joy of the unread book. If you look closely, every action must drive us forward, if only incrementally. Perhaps just being present in this moment, carrying the past with us as we move slowly forward, taking in the potential as something we can never fully reach, is in fact the goal. In this way, we may continue challenging dated perspectives and structures, and find comfort and confidence in the lessons of impatient, daring women and people pushing the boundaries of their worlds.