Adapting a beautifully evocative, deep,
and wise novel to film isn't easy. Those who succeed usually figure
out somehow to stay true to the original concept while at the same time using the visual
possibilities of cinema to advantage and telescoping scenes, bringing out their essence while respecting a film viewer's attention span. It isn't
easy.
Last night I saw THE HOURS for the
second time. The first time I saw it, when it came out in the early
2000s, I felt something deeply but wasn't sure what it was. This
time, it was clearer.
Perhaps on first viewing the meaning eluded me because I was stuck in my own ideas about what Ultimate Truth is: that there would be a realization that we are outside of time, of "The Hours." But here were the creators of this film –
the screenwriter and director along with Michael Cunningham, the
book's author, trying to say something new to me. This time, I
listened:
Everyone has a life's trajectory –
and we experience life to the fullest when we let go and live it,
whatever it may be. It may be we are destined to live a "happy" life.
Or it may be we are destined to die young, or to abandon our
children. We are not in control. And when we come to know that, we
are free. We also come to know compassion, both for ourselves and
others, because we understand that it's not a matter of choice.
It happened that I saw another film the night
before that tangentially speaks to the same truth: CRAZY WISDOM, a
biography of Chogyam Trungpa, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher who died
early from complications of alcoholism. He and Suzuki Roshi, of the
SF Zen Center, were friends, and, in a biography of Suzuki I once
read, the Roshi reportedly said that he was concerned that Trungpa, who was decades
younger, would predecease him, cutting short all the work he was
doing to establish Buddhism in American. Trungpa was said to reply
that alcohol abuse was his karma and he wasn't going to interfere
with it.
I'm sure lots of people who have
overcome alcoholism and other kinds of addiction would disagree, but
Trungpa's way of living, without resistance to whatever was happening
to him in the present, gave him a power that most of us lack. He
didn't waste energy asking the question, “How shall I live?” He
just lived, without concern for consequences.
Of course, some will say that Trungpa
was foolish, and that he hurt people by his actions. Others might say
that an enlightened being might live like that, but ordinary people
would cause chaos if they tried. But a third possibility is that we
are not, in any case, in control of our destiny; we only think we
are. We create a narrative that gives our ego the comfort of an
illusory unified self when really it is all just happening; then,
when life goes in a direction our narrative doesn't call for, we
suffer.
In any case, this viewing of the film
of THE HOURS was transformative for me. Being one with the life I am
living, not needing it to be something I imagine to be more complete
– that is the secret of happiness.
