NOTES ABOUT VIRGINIA WOOLF'S "MOMENT OF BEING"

A walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton wool for
one person, but for Woolf the experience is very vivid.

Woolf asserts that these moments of being, these flashes of awareness,
reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life, and that we, "I mean
all human beings--are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are
parts of the work of art." But the individual artist is not important in this work.
Instead she says of all people, "We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself"

Thus for Woolf a moment of being is a moment when an individual is fully
conscious of his experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches a
glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily
life. Unlike moments of non-being, when the individual lives and acts without awareness,
performing acts as if asleep, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.

Moments of being can be found throughout Woolf's fiction. ... examine
examples from her novels, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts. These are
often moments of intense power and beauty. Unlike Joyce's epiphanies, these moments do
not lead to decisive revelations for her characters. But they provide moments of energy and
awareness that allow the character who experiences them to see life more clearly and more
fully, if only briefly. And some of the characters try to share the vision that they glimpse, making
the work of art that is life visible to others.

Mrs. Dalloway presents the two characters who are most receptive to moments of being in all

of Woolf's fiction: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith.
Clarissa experiences her moments of being while in the middle of what appear to be trivial acts,
indicating that it is not the action, but her awareness that sets a moment of being apart from her
other experiences. For example, as Clarissa watches taxi cabs pass by she finds them "ABSOLUTELY
ABSORBING." Her thoughts reveal that "what she loved was this, here, now, in front
of her, the fat lady in the cab . . . Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely . . .
or did it not become consoling to believe that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb
and flow of things, here, there, she survived,". Throughout the day Clarissa is
particularly aware of these threads of connection between herself and her surroundings. The moments
of being are marked by particularly  vivid and powerful language. Because these are moments of exact feeling, the language used to convey them must naturally be precise and evocative; THE FORM AND
CONTENT MUST BE IN PERFECT SYMMETRY. In her moments of being Virginia Woolf
uses a language that approaches poetry, CLARITY is precisely what she achieves
in the moments of being.