Now she knows: That was the moment, right there. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still somewhat shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness.… What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air.

In Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, Clarissa Vaughan recalls her own close encounter with happiness, when she made the mistake of thinking it would last. Unable to join the fun, he judges the beautiful, laughing people for their complacency, their privilege, and their shallow indifference to mortality. This apparently happy scene of shared human pleasure only deepens his alienation. He has fled a failed life in America for a Mediterranean idyll, but joy continues to elude him. The narrator in Cameron’s novel experiences the “golden summery evening” at the cantina through the lens of his own unhappiness. Yet it made me a little sad to see them there, laughing and drinking champagne, for you knew it was all downhill from here. One wanted to applaud them for presenting such a successful vision of life: you could almost believe they had lived their whole lives, had been reared and groomed from birth, for this one particular night: that this was the pinnacle, this golden summery evening they had all reached simultaneously. The tables outside the cantina were full of beautiful laughing men and women.… Everyone who sat there looked on display, the women in their lovely summer dresses, the men with their hair oiled back on their heads, their tanned bare feet resting proprietorially on top of their Gucci loafers.

Michael cunningham the hours