Clarissa's idea this morning about people not really dying but becoming part of other people takes on another meaning now. As the day of Wednesday, June 23, has passed, Virginia Woolf has caught moments, touched them with water imagery, and offered them to us as happening before our eyes. But do they fade and die? No, they become part of many people's memories; they become like snapshots imprinted on the leaves of memory. They will blur, but they will be waiting for a place or a phrase to recall them.
Consider the memory-snapshots Peter takes out tonight. They once were "moments" too, unfamiliar moments to us; Clarissa, breathless, on the upper deck of a bus, babbling to Peter; Clarissa in the country; Clarissa on a hilltop, pointing, her cloak blowing out; and Clarissa, spontaneous, arguing, discussing. True, Clarissa while walking through London this morning recalled plunging into the spring air when she was a girl, but the Clarissa we see very frequently straightens herself upright when she feels herself physically, or mentally, slumping. Her imagination soars and plunges, but what of the woman herself? This Clarissa has avoided spontaneity between herself and Peter, and between herself and Richard. Does Peter see, then, the Clarissa we have seen in our moments with her? Or does he see another Clarissa beyond the white-haired, beak-nosed woman we watched mending her sea-green dress? We cannot but like Peter's memories of Clarissa. The Clarissa he is in love with, the young girl on the hill, is a captivating creature — twinkling, a bit of a nymph, thoroughly lovely. How often, we must wonder, was Clarissa like the girl he remembers? Has his memory been idealized, colored with his own imagination? For Peter is imaginative. Even now he is imaginatively trying to re-create what was happening within Clarissa as she wrote the letter he receives.
