MOMENTS OF BEING- SECOND PART

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

But the individual artist is not important in this work. Instead Virginia Woolf says of all people "We are the words; we are the work of art we are the music; we are the thing itself". Thus for Virginia 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 Virginia 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 reveal something important for the character. 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.

Mrs. Dalloway presents the two characters who are the most receptive in all of her fictions: Clarissa Dalloway and Warren Septimus Smith. Clarissa experiences her moments of being while in the middle of what appears 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 mattered that she must inevitably cease completely or did it not became consoling to believe that somehow in the streets of London ,on the ebb and the flow of things , here , there , she survived.
Throughout the day Clarissa is particularly aware of these threads of connections between herself and her surroundings.
The moment of being ARE MARKED BY PARTICULARY VIVID AND POWERFUL LANGUAGE because they are moments of exact feelings, the language used to convey them must naturally be EVOCATIVE AND PRECISE.
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 Virginia Woolf achieves in a moment of being.