The Beginning of Happiness

Virginia Woolf, 1912
portrayed while knitting
by her sister Vanessa Bell

"It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa's mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the tie, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other." (p 98)

from The Hours
by Michael Cunningham, b 1952

Conversation Piece, 1912
by Vanessa Bell (1879–1961)

Mother - daughter dialogue
from the movie script:

Julia: I bumped into Louis Waters.

Clarissa: Oh, you did? Where?

Julia: In the street.
They're all here, aren't they? All the ghosts.
All the ghosts are assembling for the party!
He is so weird.
Oh, what? You can't see that?
You can't see that Louis Waters is weird?

Clarissa: I can see that he's sad.

Julia: Mom, all your friends are sad.
You've been crying. What's happening?

Clarissa: Earlier today I looked around this room
and thought: I'm giving a party.
All I wanna do is give a party!

Julia: And?

Clarissa: I know why he does it.
He does it deliberately.

Julia: Oh, is this Richard!

Clarissa: Of course. He did it this morning.
He gives me that look.

Julia: What look?

Clarissa: To say: your life is trivial. You are so trivial.
Just daily stuff, you know, schedules and parties, and details.
That's what he means. That is what he's saying.

Julia: Mom, it only matters if you think it's true.
Well? Do you? Tell me.

Clarissa: When I am with him, I feel: "Yes, I am living!"
And when I am not with him,
yes, everything does seem sort of silly.

I don't mean with you, right? God!
Never with you. Just all the rest of it.

Julia: Sally?

Clarissa: The rest of it. False comfort.

Julia: Because?

Clarissa: If you say to me, "When were you happiest?"

Julia: Mom!

Clarissa:"Tell me the moment you were happiest."

Julia: I know! I know, it was years ago.

Clarissa: Yeah.

Julia: All you're saying is: you were once young.

Clarissa: I remember one morning, getting up at dawn,
there was such a sense of possibility!
You know? That feeling?
And -- and I remember thinking to myself:

"So this is the beginning of happiness.
This is where it starts!
And, of course, there'll always be more."

Never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning.
It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Down, down into the midst of ordinary things."

"Let us not take it for granted that life exists
more fully in what is commonly thought big
than in what is commonly thought small."

~ Virginia Woolf ~

Theo of Golden

A nice thing to do with this book:
buy an extra copy, wrap it in a golden bow,
and give it as a birthday present.

A few favorite passages
from Theo of Golden
by Allen Levi

This one just made me laugh:
29: "The sidewalk tables at the pubs and restaurants along Broadway were all occupied, and foot traffic was robust, made up predominantly of college students and other adherents to the idea that weekends begin on Thursday."

The significance of a picture frame:
128: "How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper -- a letter, a photo, a ticket stub, a sketch, a painting - is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass? What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments? What does it say of humankind that we take such trouble to freeze specific memories, that we devote such energy to capturing and preserving the 'minute particulars' of our lives?"

The signficance of the bicycle:
146 / 166: "William Saroyan said 'the bicycle is the noblest invention of man.' And in 'Resuce the Perishing,' that story, the little boy did not want a new bicycle. He liked the one he had. It cost him $27.50 of his own money. Well, I don't want a new bicycle either . . . I like mine perfectly fine. . . ."

250: "They [brothers Tom and Douglas in Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine] ride all over Green Town on their bikes. And they think Leo Huffman invented the bicycle, so they ask him to invent a Happiness Machine too."

Additional references to
Saroyan's "bicycle stories"
reminded me of
Flann O'Brien & H. G. Wells
For Ellen, as for so many of us:
146: ". . . books were her language, her neighborhood, her connection to reality."

Including: 148: Eudora Welty, "Why I Live at the P.O."
150: Carson McCullers
250: Harper Lee
254: James Hurt, "The Scarlet Ibis" -- I remember Ben & Sam reading this one in high school
256: Faulkner (Blue Jay)

The magic of majoring in English:
171: "After high school, I went away to college and got an English degree, so I could be a teacher. I read this essay one time about an English teacher, Whenever somebody asked him about his job, he would say he taught a course in magic. That made sense to me. Still does. He taught his students that words and books are like magic."

One big river
179: "Might it be that the water from the river of his childhood had found its way to this one, that the cyclical life of rainfall -- sky to earth to sky again, over and over -- had brought the elixir of the Iberian wine country to this place? That the river of gold in Portugal had come, through cloudburst and current, to this river of gray in Golden? And had soe of Golden's flow found its way to the hillsides of Theo's childhood? Was there, after all, only one big river that flowed across the earth?"

254: Additional memories of the River Marne

Theo's boyhood memory of seeing a fisherman pause
from his work on the boat to take up his paintbrush:
181: "Any fisherman knows that this is the best time to be fishing. But artists know this is the enchanted hour, when the sunlght is most magical. It's hard to know sometimes. Fish or pai, right? FIsh or paint? Well, I tell you, this time of year, I'm afraid I have no choice. I always make time for this."

The lasting impact of serving in Vietnam and
seeing the Memorial Wall for the first time
186: "It's amazing how a flat piece of stone can change your life, but that damn thing brought stuff up in me I'd been holding in for a long time. I'm still not sure why I went to see it, and I'm not sure I should have, but it probably did me some good."

Many more references to art and literature
51: Shakespeare & Co

161: "The biblically literate among them might have expected a finger to start writing on the wall at any moment: Mene, mene tekel, upharsin."
Previous connections on the Quotidian Kit
Blue Jay & Ginkgo & Picture Framing

Another blogger's
favorite Theo quotes

&

My random notes to self

1.
Is the mystery woman Mrs. Ponder?
(mentioned 2x: the photograph on Mr. Ponder's desk
and the painting in Asher's studio)

2.
Review Theo's visit to Asher's studio
and compare to concluding series of letters

3.
142: missing time
not sure about this one . . .
it's bad enough to misunderstand your own notes,
but particularly when it is a note about something
that's missing, expecially "missing time"!

Perhaps upon rereading, I can figure it out!