Rebel Prince

So I’m getting back to the library books I borrowed a couple of weeks ago, and am now reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. I haven’t read any Woolf before—I remember To the Lighthouse being on the syllabus for my freshman “civ” class in college; alas, like so many assigned texts, it went unread—but I’m liking her prose (despite her almost-obsession with semicolons). It has a poetic flow, almost like it’s meant to be spoken rather than read. I find myself lingering over phrases and turning them over in my head. Right now I’m about ten or so pages into it, and apart from its iconic opening line (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”), which as an aside evokes for me the perpetual motion of the movie The Hours, the following is my favorite passage so far. Go ahead, read it aloud. Relish it.

In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.

Ahh.

More aside: Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway inspired Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was adapted for the screen by David Hare, whose play The Blue Room I am seeing tonight. Oh, the curious happenstance.

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Isn’t it interesting and rather frightening how sometimes one tiny event, otherwise innocuous, can just set you off? After work the other day I went to my pièd-a-terre to check the mail and so forth, then got on the Metro to meet Thom at Pentagon City as usual. The train I was on stopped between stations for a while, and when it arrived at Foggy Bottom, the driver told us we had to off-load the train. Now this has happened before, and normally I’m rather laid-back—que será, será—but I was surprised to find myself frazzled. What’s going on? How long were we going to be here?

I, along with hundreds of fellow passengers, got off the train and joined hundreds more waiting on the platform. My tolerance for swirling, massive crowds of Metro commuters has been slowly diminishing over the past few months. Maybe I should take after Sarah Vowell:

The other day, in the subway at 5:30, I was crammed into my sweaty, crabby fellow citizens and I kept whispering under my breath “we the people, we the people” over and over again, reminding myself we’re all in this together and they had as much right—exactly as much right—as I to be in the muggy underground on their way to wherever they were on their way to.

I was already running late, and remembering that my cell phone doesn’t receive a signal in the Metro—a plague on your house, Sprint PCS!—I scrambled for change and went and stood in line for a pay phone—fifty cents? why, back in my day…—to call Thom and apprise him of the situation.

A minute or so later, while I was still standing in line, the train that had been off-loaded and just sitting there was back up and running, and letting people board again. A little exasperated, I got back on, and resumed my journey. When I finally got home, I just started crying. Again I surprised myself with my visceral reaction. I couldn’t explain it. Had a variety of smaller, manageable stresses just given way under the featherweight of a Metro delay? In those few moments of underground confusion, I felt so stuck, lost, disconnected. And now I was so happy to be home. “We the people, we the people…”

Aside: Metro has just approved a fare hike, effective June 27. Great.

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