It's About Time

"'The time, Septimus,' Rezia repeated. 'What is the time?'"(Woolf 70)

          As I read Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, I can't help but draw an unlikely connection to these characters from their struggle to grapple with time.  In the book, time, as an overarching motif, heals and wounds: it makes for a more introspective Clarissa, and also creates a more broken Septimus.  Taking this immense polarity off the page, I began to see the entire spectrum of effects time could have, and already has had on my life.

          From my earliest moments, time seemed to be an exploration.  I would dream and wonder, of the day so many years later, when I would finally take my first drive as a race car driver; when I would take my first flight, my first spacewalk, high in the sky.  Time seemed to be a promise, always there to be fulfilled.

         But just like the Big Ben striking, an ambivalence to the effects of time hit me first like "a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable"(Woolf 4). My first day at school, a first of a mundane many, struck me as endless. How many days left until I can put on the spacesuit for the first time? Months? Years?  The idea of time became magnificently double-edged, as I lay fascinated but fearful.
         Like the characters, though, the cold reality of time finally served to teach me.  Clarissa sees time as an endless march, and Septimus sees it as stream of endless, haunting reminders.  Time was "frail, quivering...an ancient spring spouting from the earth"(Woolf 80), and it constantly conveyed to me my own mortality; but for the first time, time didn't seem quite like a sword.

         Instead, time was more a mirror, reflecting back to you what you already know. It reminds you of a state of being, in all the ecstatic, and in all the distraught.  It is biased but at the same time unbiased, letting your own attitudes create your own self-perception.  Paradoxically, it is by showing you your own psyche that time creates change.

        Time constantly gives us the choice to create ourselves anew, positively, or negatively.
~Chris