The Hours: A Descendent of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

When Virginia Woolf was working on the draft version for "Mrs. Dalloway," she called her fledgling novel "The Hours." In August of 1923, she wrote in her diary: "I should say a good deal about 'The Hours,' & my discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment." Even after all these years, there is still more to discover in Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway," which is why it seems appropriate that Michael Cunningham should use Woolf's working title to name his book. More than just a commentary on Virginia Woolf's life, her madness, and her words, Cunningham draws from literary history and experience to create a new story. Stories are often retold, reshaped, and reinterpreted, but few books have been reworked with such amazing results as Michael Cunningham's "The Hours." He paints a very different portrait.

Cunningham's novel is still "a study of insanity and suicide," as Woolf once wrote. But, in this novel, Cunningham allows the reader to time warp to a place where our realities can be imagined and even experienced, with every bit of tinge from the past.

In "The Hours," Cunningham begins where Woolf left off. We know from history that Woolf committed suicide. Fearing that madness would once again overcome her, Virginia Woolf lodged a rock in her pocket and walked into the river. She died.

Cunningham doesn't simply describe her death. He allows us to be there, to picture her body just as Ambrose Bierce wrote in "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." We are captured by the moment of her passing.

From Woolf's final moment, we are tossed back and forth in time, as the writer, the book, and the reader all coalesce to become one existence. Can any one exist without the other two? And, how does the inspiration flow? What causes Woolf to write the text, to create "Mrs. Dalloway"?

"At this moment, there are infinite possibilities, whole hours ahead. She can feel it inside her," Cunningham writes." There's "an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self."

The writer must reach that place where mysteries are instinctually understood. As Richard says, "I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody's life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine trying to do that."

It's not foolish. It's just life. And, in the end, some die, while other can't help but live. They live for the small moments: "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." If only those moments could just last longer. If only those hours weren't followed by those other times that are "far darker and more difficult." In the end, we may end up in Room 19, on a bed of roses, or on a bed of glass. We may even find ourselves in a room full of friends, as we lament the passing of a great friend and writer.

Yes, we are fortunate to be alive. We are fortunate to be "relatively undamaged." And, we are sometimes reminded that we should cherish these few hours.