The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

She walks purposefully toward the river, certain of what she’ll do, but even now she is almost distracted by the sight of the downs, the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky.

She is not a writer at all, really; she is merely a gifted eccentric.

She has failed, and now the voices are back, muttering indistinctly just beyond the range of her vision, behind her, here, no, turn and they’ve gone somewhere else. The voices are back and the headache is approaching as surely as rain, the headache that will crush whatever is she and replace her with itself.

Here, then, is the last moment of true perception, a man fishing in a red jacket and a cloudy sky reflected on opaque water.

Here they are, on a day early in the Second World War: the boy and his mother on the bridge, the stick floating over the water’s surface, and Virginia’s body at the river’s bottom, as if she is dreaming of the surface, the stick, the boy and his mother, the sky and the rooks.

Still, this indiscriminate love feels entirely serious to her, as if everything in the world is part of a vast, inscrutable intention and everything in the world has its own secret name, a name that cannot be conveyed in language but is simply the sight and feel of the thing itself. This determined, abiding fascination is what she thinks of as her soul (an embarrassing, sentimental word, but what else

to call it?); the part that might conceivably survive the death of the body.

You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you

would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

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?

Richard told her, thirty years ago, that under her pirate-girl veneer lay all the makings of a good suburban wife, and she is now revealed to herself as a meager spirit, too conventional, the cause of much suffering.

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?

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...

seems that at that moment she began to inhabit the world; to understand the promises implied by an order larger than human happiness, though it contained human happiness along with every other emotion.

The park reveals to her its banks of lilies and peonies, its graveled paths bordered by cream-colored roses.

she is beginning to understand that another park lies beneath this one, a park of the underworld, more marvelous and terrible than this; it is the

root from which these lawns and arbors grow. It is the true idea of the park, and it is nothing so simple as beautiful.

The mirror is dangerous; it sometimes shows her the dark manifestation of air that matches her body, takes her form, but stands behind, watching her, with porcine eyes and wet, hushed breathing.

She is still regal, still exquisitely formed, still possessed of her formidable lunar radiance, but she is suddenly no longer beautiful.

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.

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.

Laura Brown is trying to lose herself. No, that’s not it exactly—she is trying to keep herself by gaining entry into a parallel world.

Still, when she opened her eyes a few minutes ago (after seven already!)—when

she still half inhabited her dream, some sort of pulsating machinery in the remote distance, a steady pounding like a gigantic mechanical heart, which seemed to be drawing nearer—she felt the dank sensation around her, the nowhere feeling, and knew it was going to be a difficult day.

But this is the new world, the rescued world—there’s not much room for idleness. So much has been risked and lost; so many have died.

So now she is Laura Brown. Laura Zielski, the solitary girl, the incessant reader, is gone, and here in her place is Laura Brown.

She is taken by a wave of feeling, a sea-swell, that rises from under her breast and buoys her, floats her gently, as if she were a sea creature thrown back from the sand where it had beached itself—as if she had been returned from a realm of crushing gravity to her true medium, the suck and swell of saltwater, that weightless brilliance.

How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that—come to kill herself?

Right now she is reading Virginia Woolf, all of Virginia Woolf, book by book—she is fascinated by the idea of a woman like that, a woman of such brilliance, such strangeness, such immeasurable sorrow; a woman who had genius but still filled her pocket with a stone and waded out into a river.

Because the war is over, the world has survived, and we are here, all of us, making homes, having and raising children, creating not just books or paintings but a whole world—a world of order and harmony where children are safe (if not happy), where men who have seen horrors beyond imagining, who have acted bravely and well, come home to lighted windows, to perfume, to plates and napkins.

He is transparently smitten with her; he is comic and tragic in his hopeless love. He makes her think sometimes of a mouse singing amorous ballads under the window of a giantess.

There is a surprisingly potent satisfaction in knowing that her vision was shared by another.

She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can’t help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality—implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer on the corner of MacDougal and Spring Streets.

Why should he want her, a wry and diffident girl, no breasts to speak of (how could she be expected to trust his desire?), when he knew as well as she the

bent of his deepest longings and when he had Louis, worshipful Louis, heavy-limbed, far from stupid, a boy Michelangelo would have been pleased to draw? Wasn’t it, really, just another poetic conceit, Richard’s idea of her?

How can she help resenting Evan and all the

others who got the new drugs in time; all the fortunate (“fortunate” being, of course, a relative term) men and women whose minds had

not yet been eaten into lace by the virus. How can she help feeling angry on behalf of Richard, whose muscles and organs have been revived by the new discoveries but whose mind seems to have passed beyond any sort of r...

“Do you believe in omens? Do you think we’re taken that much notice of? Do you think we’re worried over like that? My, wouldn’t that be wonderful? Well, maybe it’s so.”

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.

He is the opposite kind of egotist, driven by grandiosity rather than greed, and if he insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and profound than you suspect yourself to be—capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you’ve ever imagined—it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you’ve left him, that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities (not all of which are necessarily flattering—a certain clumsy, childish rudeness is part of his style), and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

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...

How is it possible that she feels regret? How can she imagine, even now, that they might have had a life together? They might have been husband and wife, soul mates, with lovers on the side. There are ways of managing.

One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.

She has lavish hopes, of course—she wants this to be her best book, the one that finally matches her expectations. But can a single day in the life of an ordinary woman be

made into enough for a novel?