"It Is Clarissa, he said. For There She Was."
We have had the movie "The Hours" here from Netflix forever, waiting for me to remember to watch it. Which means movies tend to sit... because apart from my recent Firefly craze, I don't watch TV much. I had ordered this one because I knew it was based on "Mrs. Dalloway," which is one of my favorite books. Watching the movie brought back how I felt when I first read that book.
I just told Mike the story. This is really how I read "Mrs. Dalloway" for the first time. I had this 7-10 PM British Women Writers class once a week my senior year of college, for which we had to read a book a week (Gaskell, Austen, etc.). The week we were supposed to read "Mrs. Dalloway," I hadn't really gotten into it. I sort of tried, but the stream-of-consciousness style threw me off. So I skimmed to make sure I knew the major events, then went to class. We're about 30 minutes into the class, and people are talking, and I get bored. So I pull out the book, ostensibly to look something up. And I start to read. And somehow, whatever didn't work for me earlier that week was working for me now. I read the entire book during the class. It was mesmerizing-- if the professor had called on me, I don't know what I would have done or said. I was so caught up-- this time I got it. By the time I got to the last scene...
"'I will come,' said Peter, but he sat on for a moment. What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? he thought to himself. What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?
It is Clarissa, he said.
For there she was."
I was utterly blown away. Because, you see, it's not a book you can read in bits and pieces and expect it to form a story. Then it's just the hours of one woman's day and not a whole. The revelation that the society wife and the suicide soldier are one, are feeling the same overwhelming things, won't hit you hard. But it hit me that night, and I walked out of class, under black sky and poignant stars, across a frosted quad, dazed. Because I was thinking about how life becomes truly precious as balanced against death, and because I knew the humbling truth: I could not have written that book.
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