Between the Lines: The Hours

As you know, I have been reading quite a few books lately. I've been going for at least 4 a month, hoping for 5 or 6. As I've been reading, I've been highlighting, processing and being inspired or infuriated by sentences, paragraphs and chapters. While reading The Hours, my 36th book this year, I came across a chapter that I really connected with. I decided I wanted to share a part of the chapter with you.

Maybe it will inspire you to read this book, maybe not, but I'm going to try here and there to share parts of my books with you from here on out!

Happy Reading!

"Here is her room, then: a turquoise room, not surprising or unusual in any way, with a turquoise spread on the double bed and a painting (Paris, springtime) in a blond wood frame. The room has a smell, alcohol and pitch pine, bleach, scented soap, all floating heavily over something that is not rancid, not even stale, but not fresh. It is, she thinks, a tired smell. It is the smell of a place that's been used and used.
     She goes to the window, parts the filmy white curtains, raises the blinds. There, below, is the V-shaped plaza, with its fountain and struggling rosebushes, its empty stone benches. Again, Laura feels as if she's entered a dream - a dream in which she looks onto this peculiar garden, so uninhabited, at a little past two in the afternoon. She turns from the window. She takes off her shoes. She puts her copy of Mrs. Dalloway on the glass-topped night table, she lies on the bed. The room is full of the particular silence that prevails in hotels, a tended silence, utterly unnatural, layered over a substratum of creaks and gurglings, of wheels on carpet.
     She is so far away from her life. It was so easy.
     It seems, somehow, that she has left her own world and entered the realm of the book. Nothing, of course, could be further from Mrs. Dolloway's London than this turquoise hotel room, and yet she imagines that Virginia Woolf herself, the drowned woman, the genius, might in death inhabit a place not unlike this one. She laughs, quietly, to herself. Please, God, she says silently, let heaven be something better than a room at the Normandy. Heaven would be better furnished, it would be brighter and grander, but it might in fact contain some measure of this hushed remove, this utter absence inside the continuing world. Having this room to herself seems both prim and whorish. She is safe here. She could do anything she wanted to, anything at all. She is somehow like a newlywed, reclining in her chamber, waiting for... not her husband, or any other man. For someone. Something."

 My thoughts on the book as a whole will wait until my Books of August post...

Have you seen the movie? Would you recommend it?

xoxo