Waiting for the Traffic
Jul. 23rd, 2019 07:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewdayMost writers, perhaps all, spend their lives finding, sorting, spelling out the straight lines in their own and other's lives. (And rendering them in similarly straight lines across the printed page.) In contrast, Michael Cunningham's The Hours presents us with a less-sorted, strikingly-vivid tangle of things: colors, textures, emotions--lots of emotions--in a way that is quite intentionally, quite brilliantly reminiscent of Virginia Woolf before him.
I'm now reading this book--for the second time, it turns out (I found some notes confirming this, penciled in a margin near the end)--and... it's a marvel. And I had somehow forgotten it. Am reading it now because I also have the movie which is based on it, unopened but waiting, and have always preferred to read "the book" before watching "the movie." Such a trivial thing, I now realize, to have brought one back to an experience of such brilliance.
Perhaps I'll also go back and revisit Virginia Woolf herself. To, you know, stand on a London street corner on that morning in June with Clarissa Dalloway and wait for the traffic to clear so that I may safely cross. Though I wonder, given the nature of our journey, whether we can ever safely cross. Indeed, whether we truly wish to be safe in our crossing...
LPK
Dreamwidth
7.23.2019
I'm now reading this book--for the second time, it turns out (I found some notes confirming this, penciled in a margin near the end)--and... it's a marvel. And I had somehow forgotten it. Am reading it now because I also have the movie which is based on it, unopened but waiting, and have always preferred to read "the book" before watching "the movie." Such a trivial thing, I now realize, to have brought one back to an experience of such brilliance.
Perhaps I'll also go back and revisit Virginia Woolf herself. To, you know, stand on a London street corner on that morning in June with Clarissa Dalloway and wait for the traffic to clear so that I may safely cross. Though I wonder, given the nature of our journey, whether we can ever safely cross. Indeed, whether we truly wish to be safe in our crossing...
LPK
Dreamwidth
7.23.2019
