Michael Cunningham - The Hours-Picador

Date: 2023-10-05
| osier
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Date: 2023-10-05
| Beauty is a whore, I like money better."
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Date: 2023-10-05
| she decided long ago to give in and enjoy her own voluptuous ,
| undisciplined responses, which, as Richard put it, tend to be
| as unkind and adoring as those of a particularly irritating,
| precocious child
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Date: 2023-10-05
| Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible,
| and she knows other people must love it too, poor as well as rich,
| though no one speaks specifically of the reasons. Why else do we
| struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how
| harmed? Even if we're further gone than Richard; even if we're
| fleshless, blazing with lesions, shitting in the sheets; still,
| we want desperately to live. It has to do with all this, she thinks.
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Date: 2023-10-05
| Richard argues that eternally youthful gay men do more harm to
| the cause than do men who seduce little boys, and yes, it's true
| that Walter brings no shadow of adult irony or cynicism, nothing
| remotely profound , to his interest in fame and fashions, the
| latest restaurant. Yet it is just this greedy innocence Clarissa
| appreciates. Don't we love children, in part, because they live
| outside the realm of cynicism and irony? Is it so terrible for a
| man to want more youth, more pleasure?
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Date: 2023-10-05
| These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their
| kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes,
| of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.
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Date: 2023-10-30
| Clarissa's father, gentle almost to the point of translucence,
| loved seeing women in little black dresses.
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Date: 2023-10-30
| The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes
| again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful
| remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the
| world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and,
| being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with
| skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they
| are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that
| further carelessness will not go unremarked.
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Date: 2023-12-31
| Not eating is a vice, a drug of sorts—with her stomach empty she
| feels quick and clean, clearheaded, ready for a fight. She sips
| her coffee, sets it down, stretches her arms. This is one of the
| most singular experiences, waking on what feels like a good day,
| preparing to work but not yet actually embarked. At this moment
| there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead
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Date: 2023-12-31
| Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation,
| the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her,
| an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer
| self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more
| than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum
| of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal
| through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the
| animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same
| substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write
| directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most
| profound satisfaction she knows , but her access to it comes and
| goes without warning . She may pick up her pen and follow it with
| her hand as it moves across the paper; she may pick up her pen and
| find that she's merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a
| pen , afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea
| about where to begin or what to write.     She picks up her pen.
|    Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
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Date: 2024-01-01
| What a lark! What a plunge!
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Date: 2024-01-08
| Richard cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than
| those being lived by his acquaintances and himself, and for that
| reason one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence.
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Date: 2024-01-08
| It is only after knowing him for some time that you begin to realize
| you are, to him , an essentially fictional character, one he has
| invested with nearly limitless capacities for tragedy and comedy
| not because that is your true nature but because he, Richard, needs
| to live in a world peopled by extreme and commanding figures. Some
| have ended their relations with him rather than continue as figures
| in the epic poem he is always composing inside his head, the story
| of his life and passions; but others (Clarissa among them) enjoy
| the sense of hyperbole he brings to their lives, have come even to
| depend on it, the way they depend on coffee to wake them up in the
| mornings and a drink or two to send them off at night
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Date: 2024-01-09
| She decides, with misgivings, that she is finished for today. Always,
| there are these doubts. Should she try another hour? Is she
| being judicious, or slothful? Judicious, she tells herself,
| and almost believes it. She has her two hundred and fifty words,
| more or less. Let it be enough. Have faith that you will be here,
| recognizable to yourself, again tomorrow.
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Date: 2024-01-10
| At this moment she could devour him, not ravenously but adoringly,
| infinitely gently, the way she used to take the Host into her mouth
| before she married and converted (her mother will never forgive
| her, never). She is full of a love so strong, so unambiguous,
| it resembles appetite.
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Date: 2024-01-12
| she pauses to remember herself. She has learned over the years that
| sanity involves a certain measure of impersonation, not simply for
| the benefit of husband and servants but for the sake, first and
| foremost, of one's own convictions.
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Date: 2024-01-12
| Why is it so difficult dealing with servants? Virginia's mother
| managed beautifully. Vanessa manages beautifully. Why is it so
| difficult to be firm and kind with Nelly ; to command her respect
| and her love? Virginia knows just how she should enter the kitchen,
| how her shoulders should be set, how her voice should be motherly
| but not familiar, something like that of a governess speaking to
| a beloved child
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Date: 2024-01-12
| there is only the essence of Clarissa, a girl grown into a woman,
| still full of hope, still capable of anything
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Date: 2024-01-13
| Venture too far for love, she tells herself, and you renounce
| citizenship in the country you've made for yourself. You end up
| just sailing from port to port.
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Date: 2024-01-15
| Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of
| having been young together. Maybe it's as simple as that. Richard
| was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment
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Date: 2024-01-13
| The Golden Notebook
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Date: 2024-01-13
| It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still
| sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that
| it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a
| walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now
| forgotten; Lessing has been long over shadowed by other writers;
| and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was
| ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. 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
| as 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.
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Date: 2024-01-14
| She opens the door and goes out into the hall with a great and almost
| dizzying sense of anticipation, a feeling so strong and so peculiar,
| so unknown under any other circumstances, that she decided some
| time ago to simply name it after Louis. It's that Louis feeling,
| and through it run traces of devotion and guilt, attraction,
| a distinct element of stage fright, and a pure untarnished hope,
| as if every time Louis appears he might, finally, be bringing a
| piece of news so good it's impossible to anticipate its extent or
| even its precise nature
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Date: 2024-01-15
| Clarissa believed then and she believes today that the dune in
| Wellfleet will, in some sense, accompany her forever. Whatever
| else happens, she will always have had that. She will always have
| been standing on a high dune in the summer. She will always have
| been young and indestructibly healthy, a little hungover , wearing
| Richard's cotton sweater as he wraps a hand familiarly around her
| neck and Louis stands slightly apart, watching the waves.
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Date: 2024-01-16
| the way morphine rescues a cancer patient, not by eradicating the
| pain but simply by making the pain cease to matter
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Date: 2024-01-17
| Briefly, while Julia's back is turned, Clarissa and Mary face each
| other. Fool, Mary thinks, though she struggles to remain charitable
| or, at least, serene. No, screw charity. Anything's better than
| queers of the old school, dressed to pass, bourgeois to the bone,
| living like husband and wife. Better to be a frank and open asshole,
| better to be John fucking Wayne, than a well-dressed dyke with a
| respectable job.     Fraud, Clarissa thinks. You've fooled my
| daughter, but you don't fool me. I know a conquistador when I see
| one. I know all about making a splash. It isn't hard. If you shout
| loud enough, for long enough, a crowd will gather to see what all
| the noise is about. It's the nature of crowds. They don't stay long,
| unless you give them reason. You're just as bad as most men, just
| that aggressive, just that self-aggrandizing, and your hour will
| come and go
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Date: 2024-01-19
| 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. She can bear the thought
| of her own death but cannot bear the thought of Clarissa's
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Date: 2024-01-19
| reassuring domesticity and its easy silences, its permanence
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Date: 2024-01-19
| Like the morning you walked out of that old house, when you were
| eighteen and I was, well, I had just turned nineteen, hadn't I? I
| was a nineteen-year-old and I was in love with Louis and I was in
| love with you, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful
| as the sight of you walking out a glass door in the early morning,
| still sleepy, in your underwear. Isn't it strange?"
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Date: 2024-01-21
| As Laura sets the plates and forks on the table—as they ring softly
| on the starched white cloth—it seems she has succeeded suddenly,
| at the last minute, the way a painter might brush a final line
| of color on to a painting and save it from incoherence; the way a
| writer might set down the line that brings to light the submerged
| patterns and symmetry in the drama. It has to do, somehow, with
| setting plates and forks on a white cloth. It is as unmistakable
| as it is unexpected.
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Date: 2024-01-21
| Laura reads the moment as it passes. Here it is, she thinks; there
| it goes. The page is about to turn.
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Date: 2024-01-21
| equipoise
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Date: 2024-01-21
| Yes, she thinks, this is probably how it must feel to be a
| ghost. It's a little like reading, isn't it—that same sensation of
| knowing people, settings, situations, without playing any particular
| part beyond that of the willing observer.
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Date: 2024-01-21
| Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw
| our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we
| struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our
| gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagant hopes. We live
| our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep—it's as simple and
| ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or
| take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority,
| are slowly devoured by some disease or, if we're very fortunate, by
| time itself. There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there
| when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst
| open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone but
| children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably
| be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we
| cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.
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