Claire Conger

Last night I watched The Hours, a movie based on Michael Cunningham’s 2000 novel of the same name.

The Hours is a haunting psychodrama around the suicide of Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) with the death theme running throughout.

It’s hard to believe that Ms Woolf, in real life the author of A Room of One’s Own (1929), was bi-polar and ended her life rather than go through another episode of madness. (A Room of One’s Own is the best written of any essay I’ve ever read.)

Mr Cunningham’s story weaves in a modern day Clarissa, dubbed Mrs Dalloway by her poet friend Richard who is dying of aids and also commits suicide. (Mrs Dalloway is a character and book of the same name (1925) by Ms Woolf.)

Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep) has her own meltdown when she agonizes that everything she does is trivial, at which point she has to reassure her twenty-something daughter: Not you; you’re not trivial.

Laura Brown (played by Julianne More) has a magnificent scene at the end in which she says “What does it mean to regret when you had no choice.” (She explains having had no choice over abandoning her family when poet Richard was a boy.)

I relate to Clarissa’s meltdown. I used to have those agonies, that everything is worthless. It’s a sort of depression that I buried in busyness.

Lately I’ve learned that a little Buddhist meditation goes a long way toward releasing my need for meaning and re-establishing balance with this world.

We just are. And that is enough.