The Hours

by Michael Cunningham

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.

Aspects of life that go beyond words and has a unique essence. all things have unspoken connection

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?

Love despite flaws and abrasiveness, value in resilience. Rich and poor ~ shared connection to life's endurance. the question at the end implies a universal struggle to continue living, emphasized the human drive to persevere despite challenges and the inherent value found in existence itself

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.

Shift in values towards the qualities that contribute to genuine connections and meaningful relationships. the weariness expressed towards displays of genius may indicate a desire for deeper, more heartfelt connections, evolving priorities

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.

Source of inspiration beyond intellect and emotions. it adds a layer of complexity go the characters, showcasing the interplay between their inner selves and the external world. search for meaning and connection with this mysterious essence

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.

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.

table. She does not want, not at all, to be the strange woman, the pathetic creature, full of quirks and rages, solitary, sulking, tolerated but not loved.

Even now, in this late age, the males still hold death in their capable hands and laugh affectionately at the females, who arrange funerary beds and who speak of resuscitating the specks of nascent life abandoned in the landscape, by magic or sheer force of will.

She almost protests that the bird should be laid down first, the roses arranged around its body. That is clearly how it should be done.

Cake decorating ~ she put the roses first and theletters ended up not fitting.

Clarissa, she thinks, is not the bride of death after all. Clarissa is the bed in which the bride is laid.

“It isn’t convincing enough yet, we need more things to tell us who these people really are.”

Is this what it’s like to go crazy? She’d never imagined it like this—when she’d thought of someone (a woman like herself) losing her mind, she’d imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

It could, she thinks, be deeply comforting; it might feel so free: to simply go away. To say to them all, I couldn’t manage, you had no idea; I didn’t want to try anymore.

She would be killing her son and her husband and the other child, still forming inside her. How could any of them recover from something like that? Nothing she might do as a living wife and mother, no lapse, no fit of rage or depression, could possibly compare. It would be, simply, evil. It would punch a hole in the atmosphere, through which everything she’s created—the orderly days, the lighted windows, the table laid for supper—would be sucked away.

She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest.

It’s trash, that’s all. Beauty and dignity were illusions fostered by the company of children, sustained for the benefit of children.

again. The devil is a headache; the devil is a voice inside a wall; the devil is a fin breaking through dark waves. The devil is the brief, twittering nothing that was a thrush’s life. The devil sucks all the beauty from the world, all the hope, and what remains when the devil has finished is a realm of the living dead—joyless, suffocating.

if she becomes exhausted and overwhelmed, if she falls ill again, she will have brought it on herself. And here, of course, is the dilemma: he’s entirely right and horribly wrong at the same time. She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses.

“But there are still the hours, aren’t there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my god, there’s another. I’m so sick.”

“I’ve failed.” “Stop saying that. You haven’t failed.” “I have. I’m not looking for sympathy. Not really. I just feel so sad. What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”

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.