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A Room of One's Own in an Age of Interruption

Kristen Hall-Geisler

• 7 min read

We are, we are repeatedly told, living in an age of distraction. There is much woe regarding the state of the children and their short attention spans, much lamenting poured over our own inability to focus. But like so many other issues, I’m not sure this is a personal problem to solve; it seems more systemic. And I think we’re dealing not with distractions but with interruptions.

A distraction, for the purposes of this essay, is something that flits into your consciousness. You could easily be distracted by a butterfly, or a loud bang, or a random thought that pops into your head. An interruption has been created by someone to serve a purpose, to benefit themselves. Even though they seem very show-offy, a butterfly does not actually care if you look at it or not. A ping from your phone pulls your attention from whatever you were doing to attend to a work email, a Bluesky notification, breaking news. While you might benefit in some way from taking care of a work task outside work hours, or seeing a DM from a social media friend, or learning the latest update in an ongoing situation, the actor on the other side of these interruptions benefits from your attention. The company you work for receives a little extra of your time, Bluesky as a platform depends on your engagement, and the news service can serve ads while you scan the article, with bonus points for the news service if it causes enough outrage that you share it on Bluesky. Interruptions can be mutually beneficial, but the interrupter always benefits regardless of if you do nor not.

Tending to family, to meaningful work, to community engagement—these are things to which you willingly give your attention, even on short notice, and even when it requires using an app on your phone. These are not dragging your attention away, making you feel like a stubborn ass on a rope. Interruptions pull you away from what you were doing or thinking and not toward anything meaningful or fulfilling. You will not complete your thought. You will not become a more enlightened person. I'm not a fan of Chris Hayes, but I did come across this quote from his new book The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource:

What will hold people’s attention? They [the creators of apps and news broadcasts and the like] don’t have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.

(My phone just made the little chiming text message sound. My friend and fellow writer has dropped off books for a book fair where we are each tabling that has sent out confusing instructions for its authors. I commiserate with her; we both benefit. I am interrupted but undaunted.)

Anyway, a million little interruptions. As Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own more than a century ago, these are like “an avalanche of opinion hot as lava, discoloured as dish-water.” La plus ça change.

A Room of One’s Own advocated for financial means as well as defensible space; Woolf had a small inheritance that kept her and (her husband and their dog and their marmoset) afloat. Publishing has never been an easy business for writers, and having that cushion kept her editors at bay while she wrote, preserving her attention for the work at hand. The room itself is a physical attention protector. A closed door is a clear sign that one is not to be interrupted, pulled from the train of thought that was so difficult to board when you first entered the room. A room of one's own is not only necessary for writers, or musicians, or artists, though they all benefit from financial means and a protected creative space. But imagine what freedom you, whoever you are, would feel if you were able to think as slowly or as quickly as you liked, about anything you liked, for as long as you liked without anyone, in person or via your phone, stopping you.

Some people hate this idea, like those who participated in a University of Virginia study published in 2014. Half of participants did not like being left alone in a room without distractions for even fifteen minutes. When given the option to shock themselves at the push of a button, two-thirds of men and a quarter of women were so bored they pushed the button. Researchers were surprised, since everyone keeps saying they feel distracted and want more time to think. Rather than a sign of our attention apocalypse, the shock button in the experiment might be a self-imposed distraction from one’s own thoughts, which carries a sense of agency, rather than the more odious and resented interruption from outside forces via your phone.

Even before there were smartphones, interruptions from outside forces plagued the narrator of A Room of One’s Own. Woolf describes her narrator sitting by a stream—a sparkly little stream of consciousness, you might say—and fishing out a thought. But it’s not a great thought—“how insignificant this thought of mine looked”—so she tosses it back into the water like a too-small fish. But she doesn’t let it go completely:

As it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither, [it] set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still. It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me.

I am guessing that for many readers of this essay, no matter their gender, race, neurodivergence, or other identity, our stomachs all sank a little at the rising of this man. We know that man, though he isn’t always a man. He’s an email notification that definitely could have waited until morning. He’s a red circle with a number inside telling you how many notifications you’ve missed. He’s the ding of the dryer. And he rises to intercept us whenever he finds us examining our fishy ideas because we aren’t paying attention to him and the things he values.

The thing this particular man in the essay values is proper delineation; he benefits by maintaining the Oxbridge institution and its grounds against interlopers who might change the status quo. Woolf’s narrator, in her excitement about her flashing little fish of an idea, has set out across the grassy lawn of a college campus, where women are not allowed. She must, according to this man, return to the gravel path. She must stay within its boundaries and travel only where it leads. She must let her little fish go:

What idea it had been that had sent me so audaciously trespassing I could not now remember.

Yet she continues along the path, and her strolling brings her to a new train of thought, where she remembers her own reading at university and the forms of the essay. Her thoughts flow unbroken across the page in a long paragraph until they are decidedly broken with an em dash and a flurry of robes:

But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

First, let’s admire how much a writer with a room of their own and few interruptions can do in two sentences. Virginia Woolf, everybody.

Now let’s parse exactly what she’s done. The narrator is debating—

(I just heard my phone make the ping-pong sound that means my best friends are in our group text. I do not allow myself to be interrupted.)

The narrator is debating style and meaning in the work of Lamb and Thackeray in particular when she is brought up short by the door of the library. This in itself isn’t too much of a barrier, because she opens it without taking notice of her own action. She only knows she’s breached this portal when a nice enough man tells her she cannot be there unless a man says she is allowed. Like the earlier man, he also values boundaries, and she has again crossed one. And again both her thinking and her forward motion must stop to comply with his wishes.

The narrator leaves, vowing in anger to never disturb the library’s contents, to “ask for that hospitality again.” The second man, too, has benefited by interrupting: this woman has vowed to remain out of his library, leaving its knowledge to men like himself.

But the morning is lovely and she has time to kill, so she continues her stroll. On hearing music, she moves toward the chapel it’s coming from, yet here—and this is crucial—she stops herself. She obeys in advance, as we might say a century after Woolf delivered this lecture. “I had no wish to enter had I the right,” she writes. She tells herself “the outside of these magnificent buildings is often as beautiful as the inside.” So she leans against the wall to watch men and boys coming in and out of the chapel. The morning's interruptions have achieved their aims.

Nevertheless, she persisted. She again starts thinking, this time about the centuries of history of this college.

Fear not, she’s interrupted once more, this time by everyone’s favorite enemy: a clock striking to tell her it is time for the luncheon she is scheduled to attend on campus.

After lunch, the narrator walks across campus and hears the gates being locked up behind her and against her and against anyone like her. As she walks, she is able to contemplate the poetry of Tennyson and Christina Rosetti, the nature of discussion pre- and post-World War I, and the need for nourishment, like a luncheon, in order to think properly. And then she turns her attention to the inability of generations of women to have money of their own to leave to their female heirs—a worthwhile subject of its own outside the scope of this essay on interruptions. But money does buy one the freedom to have a room of one’s own and to protect one’s attention from all those who would try to snatch it away from anyone who wants to think and create something new—a book, a song, a painting, a world.

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