Skip to main content

The Hours

The Hours, I think, is the only Michael Cunningham novel I have not read (I think) but I have watched the film by Stephen Daldry (with a screenplay by David Hare) over two evenings and found it wholly compelling.

There is a beautiful, illuminating moment on the train platform at Richmond where Virginia Woolf has 'gone for a walk' and Leonard Woolf, panicked, finds her. She refers to her sense of captivity and the way she is not allowed into her own life, surrounded by the care of doctors and the disciplines of treatment. That is exactly how it must feel - even when those treatments are keeping you alive, potentially returning you to a life - you are stripped of your autonomy, keeping you from dimensions of yourself.

Those dimensions might, of course, be crucifying rather than liberating, but they may not. They may be simply a part of a differently normal. I was reminded of a Dutch study of schizophrenia where people had been encouraged to 'talk back' to their voices, to relativise them yet incorporate them into their daily reality. As a result, the people, rather than being possessed and diminished, expanded and regained a renewed autonomy.

All three of the central characters in The Hours give you a sense of being afflicted principally by not being listened to - they may be loved but not truly seen and heard - whole dimensions of themselves remained hidden from view either ignored or policed lest the fullness of who they were (including their derangement) broke the bounds of what could be handled. Our love, however, deeply felt, rarely has the purity of being able to handle all things.

Recognition might have been liberating but rarely are we seen or let ourselves be.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more