The Hours

Clarissa exits the florist’s, feeling that her departure confines Barbara to the past while she persists into the present. On her way to Richard’s apartment, she stops where a small crowd has congregated outside the celebrity’s trailer, waiting to catch a glimpse of the celebrity. Waiting, like the other people, for 10 minutes embarrasses Clarissa. As she waits, she ponders morality; far into the future, time will have rendered the edgy teenagers in front of her to anonymous bones, while the movie star will live on in public memory. Clarissa feels attracted to the immortality fame confers.

Richard’s neighborhood, once a bohemian petri dish of novel possibilities, is now an airbrushed facsimile of its former self. Clarissa recalls Richard as he was in the old neighborhood, teenaged and graceful; she recalls standing with him, on the very corner on which she’s standing now, fighting over their future after their summer romance. She wanted freedom and was skeptical of his desire for her, wondering how he could prefer her sexless body to his lover Louis’ carnal, statuesque form. The fight seemed unremarkable at the time but now seems like a decisive turning point in their relationship.

The lobby of Richard’s building reminds Clarissa how perfectly it exemplifies squalor: “[The lobby] surprises her in almost the way a rare and remarkable object, a work of art, can continue to surprise; simply because it remains, throughout time, so purely and utterly itself” (63).