“But she feared time itself, and read on Lady Bruton’s face
as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life; how
year by year her share was sliced; how little the margin that remained was
capable any longer of stretching, of absorbing, as in the youthful years, the
colours, salts, tones of existence...”
In this passage from her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, Virginia
Woolf casts ahead (she was only 42) to a time when the share of life
would have dwindled to a narrow slice. Rereading it in my own middle age, I see
much more clearly than I did in my youth that Mrs Dalloway is a book about the purpose of our lives and the encroachment of death.
“Did it matter then, she asked herself,
walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease
completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not
become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”
I remember very clearly the moment when I
knew I wouldn’t live forever. Lying on the couch reading, as much at peace as I
ever was during my turbulent first marriage, it suddenly hit me I was already
on the downslide to being 40 years old. My youth had gone – not in terms of my
looks, which at that moment didn’t matter at all, but in terms of the number of
years I had left to live. These moments are now an eddying stream of moments,
as they are for Mrs Dalloway on the day she ventures out to buy the flowers
for her party.
“Then (she had felt it only this morning) there was the
terror; the overwhelming incapacity, one parents giving it into one’s hands,
this life, to be lived to the end, to be walked with serenely; there was in the
depths of her heart an awful fear.”
For those of us in middle age, time passes inexorably,
however we may lean back against it, marked by the tolling of bells. “Big Ben strikes.
There! Out it boomed. First, a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.
The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”
Acknowledging,
as we must, the fleeting nature of our existence, we tend to want our lives to have
a purpose – whether to lead multitudes, right wrongs, or create a masterpiece –
something significant to mark our passing between the cradle and the grave, to leave
a handprint on the earth. Clarissa Dalloway frets about her own lack of
purpose, fearing that her life has been frivolous, spent only in throwing parties
and bringing people together for brief moments of pleasure. But then it occurs
to her maybe that was precisely her gift, what she had been born to do.
“It was an offering; to combine; to create;
but to whom? An offering for the sake of offering perhaps. Anyhow, it was her
gift. Nothing else had she of the slightest importance; could not think, write,
even play the piano. She muddled the Armenians and the Turks; loved success;
hated discomfort; must be liked; talked oceans of nonsense: and to this day, ask
her what the Equator was, and she did not know. All
the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk in the
park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these roses; it
was enough. After that, how unbelievable death was!-that it must end; and no
one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”
So Mrs Dalloway gives her party. Doors are
taken off their hinges, and Chinese lanterns are hung in the fragrant June garden. Rumpelmayer’s
men bring the confiseries, while Mrs Walker, the cook, labors in the kitchen among “the plates,
saucepans, cullenders, frying-pans, chicken in aspic, ice-cream freezers, pared
crusts of bread, lemons, soup tureens, and pudding basins.” Lucy the maid
runs into the drawing room to smooth a cover and straighten a chair. Gentlemen
wait in the hall while ladies take their cloaks off in the room along the
passage where Mrs Barnett (“old Ellen Barnet who had been with the family for forty
years”) pins up their hair and helps Lady Lovejoy who is having “some trouble with
her underbodice.” Bending and straightening himself at the drawing room
door, Mr. Wilkins (“hired for parties”) announces the guests as they arrive, and Clarissa, in "ear-rings and a silver-green mermaid's dress" greets them all
with the same effusive phrases, even the Prime Minister, “this majesty
passing; this symbol of what they all stood for, English society” who withdraws into a little room with old Lady
Bruton. The rooms are packed and the noise is tremendous, and yet Clarissa has been feeling in her bones that her party is going to be a failure, the parts not cohering into a natural flow. And then a yellow curtain covered with birds of Paradise billows at the open window and
it seems "as if there were a flight of wings into the room, right out, and then
sucked back.” As it bellies out again, Clarissa sees a guest beat it back with his hand and go right on
talking, and she knows all will be well. “So
it wasn’t a failure after all! It was going to be all right now – her party. It
had begun. It had started.”
