Woolf class, week 5 - Mrs Dalloway

We're moving along: Mrs Dalloway - a novel that I thought I knew very well, and have taught countless times - and which, of course, like almost any great book, reads completely differently when one re-reads it at different times of one's life.  I can remember the first time: I was, I think, seventeen; visiting my mother who was working in Oxford that summer; I was sitting on a bench on the walk in Christchurch Meadows, and Clarissa Dalloway's acute pain that no one would know how she had loved it all, this, every moment of it, went through me like a knife (no accident, maybe, that I later wrote a piece on Peter Walsh's penknife).  I felt, like every other reader, no doubt, that Clarissa was vocalizing my most private thoughts (and fear of mortality).  And that reading has stayed with me for years, no matter what other focii I find in the novel - until this time round.  Sure, it's not obliterated - I know those bits by heart; how could they be excised?  But it seemed, on this re-read, to be not so much to be about the moment as to be about loss; lost opportunities; choices not made; the loss of the energy and unpredictability that people once had; the loss of a pre-WW1 world; loss, loss, loss.  It's not that I didn't see that before, of course - but this time it was painfully felt.  And all those characters, sensing how old they are?  They are lamenting that they are fifty one, or fifty two.  Bah.  Kittens.

Also - who left the Lunar New Year goodies in the Department Office?  They were shockingly good.  Thank you.