The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

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.

contact with Nelly’s mood.

Not eating is a vice, a drug of sorts—with her stomach empty she feels quick and clean, clearheaded, ready for a fight.

either wither or bloat;

as she looks back it seems definitive; it seems like the moment at which one possible future ended and a new one began.

There was so much, oh, far too much for me. I mean, there’s the weather, there’s the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there’s space, there’s history. There’s this thread or something caught between my teeth, there’s the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill? And, of course, there’s time. And place. And there’s you,

she sees how easily she could slip out of this life—

part of a world in which one wants what one gets.

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.