This Is How Books Win Prizes

So if you’re feeling old(er) or trapped or just tapped out, The Hours is probably the worst thing to read. Or maybe it’s the best thing, because you get stuff like this, which will destroy you but then make you want to pick up that gauntlet Michael Cunningham has thrown:

There she is…the old beauty, the old hippie, hair still long and defiantly gray, out on her morning rounds in jeans and a man’s cotton shirt, some sort of ethnic slippers (India? Central America?) on her feet. She still has a certain sexiness; a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm; and yet this morning she makes a tragic sight, standing so straight in her big shirt and exotic shoes, resisting the pull of gravity, a female mammoth already up to its knees in the tar, taking a rest between efforts, standing bulky and proud, almost nonchalant, pretending to contemplate the tender young grasses on the far bank when it is beginning to know for certain that it will remain here, trapped and alone, after dark, when the jackals come out.

Something To Consider

Does anyone else do this? Build up events so they seem to “mean” more than they really do? I didn’t even clearly know I did it (just wondered why I felt disappointed so much) until I encountered this part of The Hours years ago. So let’s revisit the helpful quote for the third time on this blog:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book.

[…] What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

“It was happiness…that was the moment, right then. There has been no other.” Michael Cunningham, you simultaneously destroy me and make my life so much better.

Something Else To Ponder

Switch your thoughts from cows and jazz to Michael Cunningham and impermanence with this passage from The Hours. I don’t even think it’s as sad as I did when I first read it–now I think it offers some good perspective:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book […]

What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

This Is Why I Love Literature

There’s something so satisfying about hearing something and immediately recognizing its truth and beauty, even if it’s something you’ve never thought of before. I picked up The Hours again last night, and found this:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than 30 years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book… What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond while the mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.