The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Media exists not in isolation, but a primordial soup of influence. We can devour the same text, listen to the same tune, but the chain link fence of causality bars us from the past as it is unrolled, upright upon periodically placed pillars of zinc.

Not only are the hours linear, crashing things that batter the shorelines of our lives, they are things filled with joy, love, quiet, and inevitably; solitude.

This is not so much a review of the exquisite, delicate and evocative tale of The Hours, but more of a visceral, vulnerable clump of a response, gathering together the spidery threads of experience, that like the chain link fence, form a web in which to cocoon response.

For recent weeks, the eleventh hour of the day is devoted to an exercise in gratitude, where the people of an employed circle indicate to one another what gratitude they find in their recent ordeals.

I am grateful that human physiology and biological structures permit us only to exist on this Earth for a short time.

what?

Silence, concern, and a dead pan repition of my statement saw me recognise that perhaps I'd invited people to read too closely between the scrawled lines of speech. To speak plainly, instead of in riddles - life being finite is what drizzles it with delicious, decadent flavour.

The fiction of The Hours is linear, as our language inescapably binds to the procession of time. Three perspectives, and their associated external unfamiliars - husbands, children, friends; grope blindly forward. Three tortured women, into which I gazed and asked myself - is this the experience of all, or have I too, succumbed to the call of their voids?

In The Hours, the experience of the everyday is suddenly a harrowing ordeal. Every moment, every action, even those of compassion, love, and friendship are highlighted as opportunities for loss. Not for loss of the self, but loss of the others - the asbence of presence, the absence of continuity in existence.

Cunningham has some interesting structural elements in the prose. There is an extraordinarly large amount of text included in brackets that increase the depth of description throughout. This is not something that I often see in text, but it does not not interrupt the flow.

There's no elephant in the room about the mastery of language and story telling on offer here. Books do not win Pulitzer prizes and get turned into movies through mistake. This is not the reason I pursued this book. Instead, it was based on a friend's recommendation, and I'm glad that we're all able to experience such beauty before the gentle hands of death guide us into the thereafter.