I have this special edition of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. It is a beautiful book, with minimalist cover art, rough-edged pages, and a nice texture on the cover—it feels weirdly soft. And it’s actually a two-in-one book: if you turn it upside down, it’s Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Because The Hours is something of a riff on Mrs. Dalloway—like Mrs. Dalloway, it relates the events of a single day for a small cast of characters, and one of the characters in The Hours is Virginia Woolf herself. She is depicted in the early stages of writing Mrs. Dalloway.
Put together in the same edition like this, the books form a literary mirror, reflecting across the 20th century.
Woolf has this remarkable ability to give the most ordinary scenes a profound, sacred quality:
Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.
It is prose at its most pure.
Then, in The Hours, there is a piece of dialogue that hit me hard in the moment I read it. I have been thinking about it ever since. It happens in an interaction between a moderately successful poet named Richard, who is dying of AIDS and currently sitting in a three-story window; and his old friend, Clarissa (she shares the first name of the titular character of Mrs. Dalloway), who is trying to get him to come down from the window and join the party she has thrown for him:
[Richard:] “I’ve failed.”
“Stop saying that. You haven’t failed.”
“I have. I’m not looking for sympathy. Not really. I just feel so sad. What I wanted to do seemed simple. I wanted to create something alive and shocking enough that it could stand beside a morning in somebody’s life. The most ordinary morning. Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”
“It isn’t the least bit foolish.”
“I’m afraid I can't make the party.”
Then Richard lets himself fall from the window.
But so here I am, standing beside your morning. (Or your evening, afternoon, dawn, or midnight; it could be anything, because your “morning” isn’t the literal morning time—it’s whenever and wherever you are right now. It is a quiet capacity. It’s this moment, because you are reading this, and so I am standing beside it. It is someone’s life, it is someone’s time. Someone’s attention, someone who is willing and able to share their attention.) What a gift.
What would that mean, to stand beside to someone’s morning? What would that look like?
(“What I wanted to do seemed simple.”)
Really, all it means to stand beside someone’s morning is that someone has allowed you to stand beside them, in that space (“The most ordinary morning.”); they’ve given you their attention. But this crushed Richard. He felt he couldn’t live up to it. He felt he couldn’t create anything worthy of this offering.
(“Imagine, trying to do that. What foolishness.”)
If you’re trying to place this in reality, it might seem a little over-dramatic. But to me, Richard’s sadness—his shame at the “foolishness” of this endeavor—is an expression of the humility that overtakes you in the awareness of this circumstance. I feel such humility, and such gratitude, because your attention really is the most precious thing. Our lives are bounded, and they are defined by the things we give our attention to. It is notable that we talk about “paying” attention, as if attention were money. You should be intentional with the way you spend your attention, but probably more importantly, you should do what you can to increase your wealth of attention; to expand this space, and so increase your capacity for life.
The way you do this is you pay attention to life itself, whenever you can. You notice any and every experience.
What is your morning like? Is it eager yellow sun?—notice the angle at which it paints the walls. Or is it the light of a lightbulb, shielding you from the dusk?—notice its temperature, its shape, the way it blurs into the rest of the scene. Or are you suspended in the light of your phone, a narrow band of bright white awareness floating in the blue darkness of your bedroom?—notice that. What is it like?
Let your noticing get very wide, so that you see the rest of the room and the whole space in which it is all contained, all at once. This slice of life for which you have allowed me to stand beside you. Notice the sounds of the morning, and notice the feeling of your body on your couch or your bed or your chair. Notice the air in the room, your mood. Is there someone there with you? How do they color your awareness in this moment? What is it like, to be there? Really there?
Drop back and consider everything that you can see and hear and feel as if it was a shot meticulously crafted by a film director with vigorous artistic vision. What is there to appreciate?
Try to see your morning, the most ordinary morning, the way Virginia Woolf would have written it, the way Richard revered it—as something sacred. You can give it this character, just by changing your incorporeal posture. Lean back in your mind, and let the morning be. What is it like?