12.31.02 - 1:34 p.m.

I've just finished read The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Fabulous book, by the way, and definitely the most compelling I've read in a while. I'm not interested in giving it up, even though a few people have asked to borrow it. I might just buy another copy to loan out to people so I can keep mine.

The book, by the way, is no more than one day in the life of three different women: Virginia Woolf, in Richmond, London, as she starts writing Mrs. Dalloway, Laura Brown, a 1940s housewife who spends half the day reading Mrs. Dalloway, to escape from the ordinary drudgery of preparing her husband's birthday dinner, and Clarissa... well, Clarissa something, whom her friend/ex-lover Richard calls Mrs. Dalloway, as she prepares for a party for Richard to honor him before he receives the Carruthers prize for poetry.

...and, I'm so glad I took the time to write that, because the relationship between the three just suddenly became very, very clear to me. Laura seemed completely unrelated to the other two (except she was reading Mrs. Dalloway), and suddenly the book is that much better.

Dayum. Good. Book.

This entry is just to preserve one of then last passages in the book, which I quite loved:

Yes, Clarissa thinks, it's time for the day to be over. We throw our parties; we abandon our families to live alone in Canada; we struggle to write books that do not change the world, despite our gifts and our unstinting efforts, our most extravagent hoprs. We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep - it's as simple and ordinary as that. A few jump out of windows or drown themselves or take pills; more die by accident; and most of us, the vast majority, are slowly devoured by some disease, or, if we're very fortunate, by time itself. There's just this for consolation: 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, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more.

That's just so utterly, heartbreakingly, perfectly right and just lovely, just lovely that something swells in my throat and I feel one of those moments - one of those transporting, transplanted moments where you can just breath in something so bright it seems like fire, something so luminous you feel transparent with it, suffuse with light.