"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
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 ~
