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 accretes that this moments of being, this 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 hole 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 Woolf says of all people “we are the words; we are the work of art; we are the music; we are the thing itself”. Thas for Woolf a moment of being is a moment when an individual is fulling conscious of this experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse of his connection to a large pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life.

Unlike moments of not being, when the individual lives and acts as if asleep the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.

Moments of being can be found through-out Woolf’s fiction…examine examples from her novels, “Mrs Dalloway”, “to the light-house” and “Between the acts” these are often moments of being intense power and beauty.

Unlike Joyce’s epiphany, this moments do not reveal something important for the character.

But they provide moments of energy and awareness that allowed 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 most receptive in all of Woolf’s fictions: Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Worren 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 the moment of being a part from her other experience.

For example, as Clarissa watches taxi cabs pass by she finds them “absolutely absorbing”. Her thoughts reveal that “watch love was this, here, now, in front of her, the fat in the cab…Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely…Or did it not became consoly to believe that somehow in the street of London, on the ebb and the flow of things, here, their, she survived”.

Through-out the day Clarissa is particularly aware of these threads of connection between herself. The moments of being are marks by particularly vivid and powerful language. Because there are moments of exact feelings the language use to convey them must naturally be precise.

The form and content must be in perfect symmetry.

In her moments of being Woolf uses a language that approaches poetry. Clarity is precisely what Woolf achieves in a moment of being.