The times they are a-changin'

Sometimes I amaze myself. When I saw the film of The Hours (ten years ago! I am so old!), I loathed it. Intensely. There was really nothing redeeming about it; Sarah and I saw it together, and we were mostly sad that we weren't alone in the theater so we couldn't make nose jokes. I also wasn't a fan of the first Cunningham that I read, so I went into this novel with some trepidation.

That said, I just absolutely loved it. It is so beautiful! Another one where I had to pause after some sentences and just mediate on them and ache with them. Yes, it is extremely bleak, but I'm feeling bleak, so it worked for me.

I was surprised to have such an immense gulf in my feelings about the film versus the novel, but I think this is due to several factors:

1) I've probably grown some generally in the last ten years (actually, I know I have; I weigh about 15lbs more; sigh).

2) I've read Mrs. Dalloway; that seriously helps.

3) I've become enamored with Virginia Woolf; not Mrs. Dalloway so much, but adoring and appreciating The Waves and The Voyage Out certainly helps.

4) I think this does work much better as a novel than a movie. The beauty is in the language and the peculiar intimacy that you can have in a novel that is hard to translate into a film.

5) I'm in the middle of RoTP, and so anything is a relief, particularly anything that treats women as full human beings.

Some favorite quotes (particularly the last one):

He could. . . have had anyone, any pageant winner, any vivacious and compliant girl, but through some obscure and possibly perverse genius had kissed, courted, and proposed to his best friend's older sister, the bookworm, the foreign-looking. . . who had never been sought after or cherished; who had always been left alone, to read.

******

It seems possible (it does not seem impossible) that she's slipped across an invisible line, the line that has always separated her from what she would prefer to feel, who she would prefer to be.

****** 

What she wants to say has to do with all the people who've died; it has to do with her own feelings of enormous good fortune and imminent, devastating loss. If anything happens to Clarissa she, Sally, will go on living but she will not ,exactly, survive. She will not be all right. What she wants to say has to do not only with joy, but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half. . . Now there is a loss beyond imagining.

I also love the whole passage on Clarissa's feelings about beauty.