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BOOKSHELF
A Walker’s City
28 Apr 2003

In The Hours, Michael Cunningham’s 1998 New York City revisit of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham evokes Woolf’s 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 vendor’s 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. It’s the city’s 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 potter’s field that was simply paved over, a hundred years ago, to make Washington Square.”

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