"The sensible world' writes Ann Banfield in a study pairing Bertrand Russell with Virginia Woolf, "presents a broken surface. Contact, so essential initially, blocks access to its geometry. To reach it one must leave behind the dinner table and the streets, "escape... from the common sitting-room" (Room, 118)'¹ (Banfield, 2000: 179). For Woolf, as for the mathematical philosopher Russell, it would appear, human contact is part of the sensible world of phenomena which veils the true "geometry' of the world. And Banfield continues her patchwork of quotations: "Only after an exposure can one withdraw into a region where "all the being and doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated" (TL, 95). Each aspirant to knowledge must shed the "I", opening to the world, then return to privacy' (Banfield, 2000: 179). So, withdrawal into a private space, both literally and metaphorically, as the route to knowing, is only possible after exposure to communality, and thus "a core of impenetrable privacy is ultimately reached, "cleared of chatter" (TL, 170), inaccessible to any intruder' (Banfield, 2000: 180).