The memory of Virginia Woolf’s mother permeates her 1927 family-focused novel, To the Lighthouse. Woolf’s novel provides a thorough and personal picture of the weight of accumulating entropy through the gradual unraveling of the Ramsay family alongside Lily Briscoe, a painter working on a fitting memento of their shared coastal sojourns. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay’s opposing approaches to decline show equally opposing outcomes. The novel reveals a process of renovation akin to Tomkins’s conception of a “strong theory,” wherein Lily’s final brushstroke and the remarkable interpersonal connections in the novel’s latter pages anticipate the end of the accumulative process.