odd001junk3770

Okay, so take three women: Virginia Woolf in 1923 as she is in the beginning stages of writing Mrs. Dalloway, a woman of the present day buying flowers for the party she's hosting, and a young married woman, in the year 1949, who feels trapped in her marriage and actually pays for a hotel room in order to read Mrs. Dalloway uninterrupted. I haven't even read Mrs. Dalloway, and I really didn't know what to expect from this novel when I read the prologue (in which Woolf puts a skull-shaped stone in her coat pocket, and, well, you know the rest), but none of that really mattered. It is an excellent book. It's slightly depressing... or maybe vaguely comforting. For example, from the second to last page: "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." I found myself identifying with Virginia Woolf far more than I ever thought I would or should, though.

2023-02-03 17:10