I watched The Hours the other night for the first time. I read the book years ago but missed the movie and kept meaning to see it (with a line-up like that who could miss it?) and sat down late while I was working on various pointless tasks and watched it.

It was intense and emotional - as to be expected - but there was one moment between Meryl Streep and her daughter, played by Clare Danes, that really leaped out at me. They are in the contemporary storyline, in modern New York, and talking about life and Streep tells her daughter that she can remember a day in her life, when she was much younger, when she woke up in the morning excited by all the possibilities of what the day had to offer and she was wonderfully deliriously happy. She thought that was beginning of happiness, that she had reached a point in life where everyday would be that magical, but she discovered afterward this was not the case it was just that day in which she was happy. It wasn't the beginning of anything, it was merely the moment.

I pulled the book off my shelf and went looking for the passage there which is altered a bit and a much longer paragraph. Here are the relevant bits:

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book....There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment right then. There has been no other.

This notion of transitory happiness is something that fascinates me. My family is full of what should be happiness but was not. I don't mean to suggest in the slightest that I had a miserable childhood but rather that for my parents and many others there was the facade of happiness but not personal happiness. If you have a dependable job, a house, children, a car, a dog and Gunsmoke on Saturday nights then aren't you happy? You must be happy, the way you feel - however confusing it might be - must be what happiness is.

And if you don't think so, if you think something is wrong, then you spend your life trying to figure out why happiness didn't come for you in the way you expected; in the way it should have. And you are very sad because nothing makes any sense.

I don't believe in going to someone to find out how to be happy; to me it is crystal clear why many people are not. My great grandparents look very happy in their earliest pictures, in 1910 and 1916 and then they change dramatically as his drinking wore her down. If you ever read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that was their life. My grandmother and her siblings loved their father dearly but he did not bring them happiness and her mother lost all her joy in the sorrow of loving him.

They should have been happy but he couldn't break his addiction to liquor and she couldn't break her addiction to him. (It's not like either of them had any choice in the matter though really.)

There are so many pictures strewn across my desk downstairs of happy families who I know were desperately sad. But they smile up at me, trying to be what they are supposed to be, trying to find what they think should be so easy, so common.