Too much, oh, far too much.

“‘There was so much, oh, far too much for me.  I mean, there’s the weather, there’s the water and the land, there are the animals, and the buildings, and the past and the future, there’s space, there’s history.  There’s this thread or something caught between my teeth, there’s the old woman across the way, did you notice she switched the donkey and the squirrel on her windowsill?  And, of course, there’s time.’”  (Cunningham 66).

This quote is coming from Richard, who is ill and going insane.  He says that there was “too much for him,” too many things in life to take in and contemplate.  As was shown by an early quote and concordance, Richard is “falling out of time,” and does not respect time; therefore, in trying to deal with everything in life, he must not only deal with the present, but the past and future, too, since his sense of time is muddled.  This is the same as Virginia Woolf’s “Septimus,” who thinks he sees his dead friend Evan.  Septimus and Richard, unlike the two Clarissas, do not live in the moment, and time takes its toll on them because of it.