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In The Hours, Michael Cunninghams 1998
New York City revisit of Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Dalloway,
Cunningham evokes Woolfs descriptions and musings of
a walk through London. Instead of St. James Park, his Clarissa
walks through the West Village.
Clarissa crosses Eighth Street. She loves, helplessly,
the dead television set abandoned on the curb alongside a
single white patent leather pump. She loves the vendors
cart piled with broccoli and peaches and mangoes, each labeled
with an index card that offers a price amid abundances of
punctuation $1.49!! 3 for ONE dollar!?!
50 Cents EA!!!! Ahead, under the Arch, an old
woman in a dark, neatly tailored dress appears to be singing,
stationed precisely between the twin statues of George Washington,
as warrior and politician, both faces destroyed by weather.
Its the citys crush and heave that move you; its
intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan
as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads but you find
it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city;
that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another,
older city, and then another and another. Under the cement
and grass of the park (she has crossed into the park now,
where the old woman throws back her head and sings) lay the
bones of those buried in the potters field that was
simply paved over, a hundred years ago, to make Washington
Square.
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