“Beauty Anyhow”: Reading Virginia Woolf in Vermont

I am reading Mrs. Dalloway with seventeen students in a barn in Vermont. It’s a hot afternoon, and there’s a fan chugging away noisily and ineffectually in the window. Outside the sky is a deep and starding navy blue. As always, I’m wondering whether we should go outdoors and sit in a meadow, lie on our backs and examine the oudine of the mountains that cradle us, watch the leaves of the silver birches shift in the wind like daubs of paint in an Impressionist painting. If we lie on our backs and watch the mountains while we talk about Virginia Woolf, will our discussion of Mrs. Dalloway’s love of beauty be more memorable, perhaps more insightful? Will an experience of beauty in nature help us to articulate the beauty of the novel?