Tonight I saw “The Hours” with my friend Camille. The movie ties together the stories of three people affected by Virginia Woolf’s “Miss Dallaway”: the author (1910?), a housewife (1951 Los Angeles) and a party host (2001 NYC). A memorable line, as Woolf speaks to her husband about the trap the suburbs are: “If I must choose between Death and Richmond, I choose Death.” I can’t help but wonder that someone feels that way about Schaumburg, IL, or San Jose, CA, right now. While it wasn’t a spectacular movie, I was caught up in its underlying theme: what it means to exist, and what it means to live. It brought back to my mind one of Woolf’s books, “To the Lighthouse”, and the difference between matter (the superficial) and form (the spiritual), and that brought back to life what it means to me to be living, and why schooling and the diversity of opinion and perspective is so important to me right now.They’re doing house-to-house searches for weapons now in Iraq. I wonder how Gore would have handled this? Of course, we probably wouldn’t be at war right now, except with Al-Qaeda.
Mortie, Mortie: He's no shorty, Mortie.