life! london! this moment of june!

Recently I had a fever and re-read both The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway, which is honestly a superb way to experience both books. For those of you who might not have read them yet, The Hours is essentially the sickest possible literary fanfiction about Mrs. Dalloway, and they’re both about why/if life is worth living and art is worth making and how our individual self is hopelessly meshed with others in ways we probably can’t even imagine. Both remind me of what Tony Kushner wrote in his acknowledgements for Angels in America: “One is a fiction,” he said, meaning that he could not think of himself or the art he made as issuing from a single person, when he was so shaped and made possible by the people he loved, who loved him.

The Hours also has some of the most haunting passages about the creative life that I have ever read—all of them concerned with women who are trying to make art in the face of profound hopelessness, illness, doubt. (Michael Cunningham has the distinction of being one of the only white male authors I will forever stan.) In one, he describes Virginia Woolf preparing for a day of writing:

Her mind hums. This morning she may penetrate the obfuscation, the clogged pipes, to reach the gold. She can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel, purer self. If she were religious, she would call it a soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences, though it runs like veins of brilliant metal through all three. It is an inner faculty that recognizes the animating mysteries of the world because it is made of the same substance, and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty.

I love that passage. It gets at something about creativity—that writing a lasting piece of literature isn’t about being smart or emotionally attuned or brimming with imagery, though those things matter. It’s something else, something both of us and beyond us. If you believe in that, you might also begin to see the world in the way Mrs. Dalloway presents it: a world in which the story of one person can’t be told without many others, some she knows, some she doesn’t, threaded together into something larger, tugging at each other in unseen ways, tied by London and the passing of time and the questions shimmering at the corner of the human psyche about why we’re here and what life is for.

In the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf describes a walk down the street this way:

Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar, the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

(I mean!!!)

As a character in The Hours reads that passage, decades after Virginia Woolf wrote it, she wonders something that I think all of us Woolf fans have asked ourselves many times:

How, Laura wonders, could someone who was able to write a sentence like that—who was able to feel everything contained in a sentence like that—come to kill herself?

Mrs. Dalloway is such an intense, pulsating, arms-flung-out expression of life that I admit that this very question haunts me when I read it. It’s both a persistent question and, I think, the wrong one.

I don’t believe the old baloney about the most talented people ending their lives because they’re too pure or complicated or visionary for this world. The memory of how people romanticized the 27 Club when I was a teen now turns my stomach. (Don’t get me started on how most people in that “club” were actually suffering from serious addiction that no one helped them with because they were still making money off their art and suffering. Capitalism kills, not genius.)

Virginia suffered enormously in life—from sickness, blinding migraines, and clinical depression that narrowed her life far more than she could stand. And she sat down at the desk enough days in a row to write some of the most explosive, complicated, life-affirming passages ever written. She wrote about haunted people being connected to everyone else by threads we cannot see, no matter how the darkness seeks to convince us we are alone. Towards the end of Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa develops “a transcendental theory” about how that idea might extend even beyond our time on earth:

…since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that…

There it is again. We are both ourselves, our living forms, which are precious for their fleeting, inexplicable specificities—and we are something else. Which spreads wide. Our “apparitions” might betray us, with all their frailties. But “the unseen part of us” goes far beyond our single body, our single life.

It’s maybe obvious to point out the way in which that paragraph is a metaphor for literature. The parts of Virginia that survived, are “recovered somehow attached” to the people who read her. To try and make something that lasts is to believe, at least a little, in that idea of ourselves, branching and shimmering and connected to others. It is the opposite of what depression tells us — that we are alone — and yet both ideas exist, so often, inside the same person.

The question might not be how could someone write this and end her own life, but rather how did someone who believed in this unseen part of us manage to put it on paper in way that outlived her. At least, that’s the one I’m asking these days.