The enchanted Mrs. Dalloway.

I spent the best part of two decades outside of Australia and I wonder sometimes if I ever returned. I am here, but I am not here. World’s end. We must only say, yes.

“It might be possible that the world itself has no meaning.”

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway is the book we all need right now. Her tale of a nation reeling from war; a world upended; a time suspended, could not be a more apt fable for our age.

Ours is a world untethered. We are unsure where we stand. This is not the future we were promised. Yes, we live longer. We have conquered many diseases. We are richer. But we are not happier.

We live in an age of mass communication, but we struggle to speak to each other. Our young people report record levels of mental illness. We are tired, stressed; we are overworked and burdened with debt.

In Mrs. Dalloway, London’s Big Ben tolls marking a turning. The arms of the clock move, but the world is out of time. Woolf’s characters yearn for something ineffable; something lost amid a changing world, a future of which they will not be a part, and a past that they will never recapture.

Clarissa Dalloway, wonders if we “are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship.” Might we at least, she says, “be as decent as we possibly can.”

We might ask ourselves the same question.