Some of my favorite lines ...
Virginia Woolf in 'The Hours'
It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she -how anyone- can make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied -it announces itself inside her head, faintly but distinctly, like a voice crackling from a distant radio station. She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid. Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren't they? It's possible -perhaps even likely- that someone has ended his or her life right here, in this room, on this bed. Someone said. Enough, no more; someone looked for the last time at these white walls, this smooth white ceiling. By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange.
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. There might, she thinks, be a dreadful beauty in it. like an ice field or a desert in early morning. She could go, as it were, into that other landscape; she could leave them all behind -her child, her husband and Kitty, her parents, everybody- in this battered world (it will never be whole again, it will never be quite clean), saying to one another and to anyone who asks. We thought she was all right, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones. We had no idea.
She strokes her belly. I would never. She says the words out loud in the clean, silent room: '"I would never." She loves life, loves it hopelessly, at least at certain moments; and she would be killing her son as well. 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.
Still, she is glad to know (for somehow, suddenly, she knows) that it is possible to stop living. There is comfort in facing the full range of options; in considering all your choices, fearlessly and without guile. She imagines Virginia Woolf, virginal, unbalanced, defeated by the impossible demands of life and art; she imagines her stepping into a river with a stone in her pocket. Laura keeps stroking her belly. It would be as simple, she thinks, as checking into a hotel. It would be as simple as that.
Virginia Woolf in 'The Hours'
It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she -how anyone- can make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied -it announces itself inside her head, faintly but distinctly, like a voice crackling from a distant radio station. She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid. Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren't they? It's possible -perhaps even likely- that someone has ended his or her life right here, in this room, on this bed. Someone said. Enough, no more; someone looked for the last time at these white walls, this smooth white ceiling. By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange.
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. There might, she thinks, be a dreadful beauty in it. like an ice field or a desert in early morning. She could go, as it were, into that other landscape; she could leave them all behind -her child, her husband and Kitty, her parents, everybody- in this battered world (it will never be whole again, it will never be quite clean), saying to one another and to anyone who asks. We thought she was all right, we thought her sorrows were ordinary ones. We had no idea.
She strokes her belly. I would never. She says the words out loud in the clean, silent room: '"I would never." She loves life, loves it hopelessly, at least at certain moments; and she would be killing her son as well. 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.
Still, she is glad to know (for somehow, suddenly, she knows) that it is possible to stop living. There is comfort in facing the full range of options; in considering all your choices, fearlessly and without guile. She imagines Virginia Woolf, virginal, unbalanced, defeated by the impossible demands of life and art; she imagines her stepping into a river with a stone in her pocket. Laura keeps stroking her belly. It would be as simple, she thinks, as checking into a hotel. It would be as simple as that.
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