The first headnote emphasises identity; our identity is dependent on our relations with others, including those we have not met, and even objects, whether they are edifices like barns or alive like trees. The second headnote links this interdependent identity to survival. It is through our tree-like linkage – our branching out – to other people that we survive. Trees are, or can be, a lattice, a network. Woolf here suggests that our survival is dependent on this kind of network. It is not just through a one-on-one connection that we continue on after death, but rather through a mesh of multiple connections. More than half a century later, in their song, ‘Touch of Grey’, the Grateful Dead acknowledge this multiple dimension of survival too. This song, about growing old – much like Mrs Dalloway – is wistful in tone. The voice is that of a middle-aged man behind in his rent – that is, someone who has not made the most of his life, like, perhaps, Peter Walsh. Yet through the song the music remains upbeat, and the first-person pronoun of the refrain, ‘I will get by’, changes to ‘we’ in the last line of the song. We will survive, ‘get by’, through our connections with each other.

We survive, as scientists now prove, through ‘coevolution’, or through interacting with other people, species, and groups, and through changing in response to these interactions.