Leaden circles on the air…

“Big Ben was beginning to strike, first the warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable.”

- from Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

The school song is playing from the fake bell tower on campus as I’m typing this, telling me it’s six o’clock and it’s time to eat dinner.

Time.  It’s such an awful restriction and yet I guess completely necessary for society to function.  I’m particularly swamped with things to do lately and I just don’t have enough time to do everything I want to.  So how do I decide what gets done when?  And why is that damned clock always there to remind me how little time I have?

In Mrs. Dalloway the ringing of the hour serves as a device to unite the characters, as they all hear the bells and are all affected by passing time.  But these “leaden circles” dissolving on the air, as Woolf describes the chimes, are also restricting to the characters.  They jar them out of their daydreams and memories, they dictate where they should be at certain points of the day, remind them of their responsibilities, structure and organize their day.

How did we let something get such control over our lives?  How can we escape?