Moment of being

Virginia Woolf is recognize as one of the great innovators of Modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view have been influenced many writers that followed her. But one particularly interesting technique that does not seem to receive much attention is her use of the moment of being.

To wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorable -even if the events themselves are unimportant- that they can vividly recall while other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences: moments of being an of non-being.

Virginia Woolf never explicitly defines what she means by moments of being. Instead she provides examples of these moments and contrasts them with moments of what she calls “non-being”. Moments of non-being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware of even as she or he experiences them. She notes that people performs routine such as walking and shopping without thinking about that. This part of life is “not lived consciously” but instead is embedded in “a kind of non-descript cotton wool”. It is not the nature of the actions that separates moment of being from moments of non-being. One activity is not intrinsically more mundane or more extraordinary than the other. Instead, it is the intensity of the feeling, one’s consciousness of experience (la consapevolezza dell’esperienza che uno ha; one=impersonale) that separates the two moments (distinguish between moments when character is aware of the moment, has a deep perception, and moments of non being which the character is not aware. Things are just things themselves). A walk in the country can be easily hidden behind the cotton wool for one person, but for Virginia Woolf the experience is very vivid.

Virginia Woolf asserted that these moments of being, these flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life and that we “mean all human beings are connected with this; that the whole world  is a work of art (l’estetismo è la visione della vita durante il fine ‘800; “art for art sake”; Il Piacere di Andrea Sperelli, romanzo di formazione, presenta al lettore le tappe fondamentali attraverso le quali il soggetto impara qualcosa; V. Woolf vive durante il periodo vittoriano, ma le tecniche sono sperimentali) that we are a part of a work of art” but the individual artist is not importantin this work. Instead she seays 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’s not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse (piccola occhiata) of his connection of a larger part 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 sleeps, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality (momento in cui siamo pienamente a conoscenza di ciò che facciamo, noi gli diamo importanza a seconda della nostra sensibilità; “opaco” è molto diverso dall’alone luminoso -> mondo dei sensi tradotto in comunicazione).

Moments of being can be found throughout Virginia Woolf’s fictions: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Between the Acts. Unlike Joyce’s epiphany, these moments do not lead to decisive revelations for her character (l’epifania modifica la percezione del senso) but they both 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 one with the stream of life. Throughout her the day Clarissa is particularly aware of these threads of connection between herself and her surroundings. All Virginia Woolf’s moments of being are marked by particularly vivid and powerful language. Because these are moments of exact feelings, the language used to convey them must naturally be precise and evocative, the form and content must be in perfect symmetry.

It’s true that in a novel long starches of narrative can be cloaked in mundane language: not every scene is of equal value or must carry an equal weight. But in her moments of beings V. Woolf uses a language that approaches poetry.