A Beautiful Life

Death is a topic that scares some and not others. Personally, death terrifies me. Even being raised in a Christian home and believing in Heaven, it is still is a terrifying subject to me. These past few English classes we have been focusing on the novel, Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, but also watching a film called The Hours. The Hours is a very dark but terrific film that shows the lives of three women, Virginia Woolf, a wife who is currently reading Mrs. Dalloway, and a modern day Clarissa Dalloway, whose lives are all connected by the novel Mrs. Dalloway. These women are all faced with some sort of suicide in their lives or the attempt of a suicide.

At first this movie was a bit hard to follow. But as the story went on, it became much more easier to follow. Not to mention it made reading the actual novel a lot more easy. In the novel and in the movie there is a common theme of life and death. The fear or death, but also learning from death, and taking life for what it is, making it mean something and cherishing it.

I think that is the problem with today’s society. We aren’t living or valuing the life we are given. In the movie, Virginia Woolf’s husband asks why someone had to die in the novel. She replied with, “someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It’s contrast.” We shouldn’t have to have someone die in order for us to value life. We should value it from the beginning. We should protect it with all our strength.

A small example of this for myself is fake tanning. I am a girl and yes I will admit that before Prom and other events I will go to the tanning bed once or twice to get a bit of color. So many times has my father told me to stop because I could get skin cancer, but do I listen? No. But now that my father has a cancer scare, it’s made me rethink the entire idea of fake tanning. Why do something that causes something so awful, when it is preventable? It’s sad because skin cancer is so preventable, but it shows that I don’t value my life as much as I should.

We shouldn’t have to learn from death in order to live. Life is beautiful and short. Its a gift given to us and we should cherish it. I am going to end this post with a quote spoke by Virginia Woolf. It is in the form of a letter that she leaves her husband.

“Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours” (The Hours)