"Moments of being": Virginia Woolf on life
reading "Mrs Dalloway" (1925) through "A Sketch of the Past" (1939)
Virginia Woolf was more than “just” a novelist. Though her legacy as a modernist writer has survived throughout the 20th century and still has a strong, unquestionable influence on contemporary literature, Woolf was also an eclectic intellectual, an intellectual “tout court”1, and in order to try to understand her to the fullest, one needs to dwell on the different personae that made up her intellectual life and personality, as she was also a literary critic — and therefore an incredibly perceptive reader — an essayist, a publisher, and a feminist; the latter being possibly the one persona which emerges from all the others and informs and defines them at the same time.
I find this distinction to be fundamental because Woolf, more than many other writers of the period, has left us an exceptional amount of non-fiction pieces — from essays to letters, from diaries to other autobiographical writings — which prove not only her deep understanding of the importance of communication with other people, through writing and reading (she was, after all, part of the Bloomsbury group, had been surrounded by intellectuals her whole life and carried on correspondences with many of them), but also of how aware she was of the usefulness of the tool to reflect on herself, her life and her responses to it; and through herself on people close to her, on her surroundings, her age and, obviously, on literature. Therefore, some of the concepts she discussed in her non-fiction —as a critic, reader and writer — can be best understood through the reading of her fiction, and vice versa. These two parts of her work are intertwined and constantly mirroring one another.
A great writer is a writer who manages to make us see things we know or feel, even unconsciously — and at times can relate to — as if for the first time, to uncover a truth about human experience we’ve always known to exist, but in such a way as to make it sound like a revelation. When I read Woolf I always get the impression that she could absorb life, people, moments with such keenness of perception, and re-elaborate them, whether to reflect on them in her non-fiction or to make them emerge from characters in her fiction (or both: think about essays like Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown or A Room of One’s Own, which are built through the use of narrative parts) in ways which still amaze me every time I pick up one of her books.
Life is what informs Virginia Woolf’s work. “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual”, she reported in a diary entry from February 19222, around the time when she started working on Mrs Dalloway — which is indeed a novel that manages to encapsulate the wholeness of life within the span of a single day, through the musings of its protagonists on the past and the preoccupations for a future which is looked at with fear, because of how inescapable and looming death is perceived to be.
As Erich Auerbach explained, the defining mark of Woolf’s novels as modernist novels is a shift of the gravity center not only towards the character’s inner life, but to a new faith in the possibility for seemingly ordinary and unimportant events to trigger ideas that “amount to a synthesis of the intricacies of life in which her incomparable beauty has been caught, in which it at once manifests and conceals itself”3. There is therefore no need for the traditional chronological treatment of events; what matters is “the flow and play of consciousness”. (Auerbach 1953: 535).
Beauty therefore blossoms from the ordinary; it is inherently part of it. In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith notices this connection in moments of extreme clarity and reflects on this truth repeatedly:
Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks — all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.
Septimus seems to be so sensitive to beauty because of his tragic history: a shell-shocked man who has managed to come back to civilian life in London from the trenches, but who is irreparably psychologically wounded, he can deeply feel his connection with the world because he has been exposed directly to atrocious violence and death. The trauma of the Great War, which is thoroughly explored through his character, is indeed a constant reminder of this impending sense of death — to which all other characters in Mrs Dalloway, especially Clarissa, are drawn to — but which is also the reason why each instant of their ordinary lives — a sound, the sight of an object, meeting a beloved person after a long time apart, a word — can trigger in them a shock, a moment of full consciousness of reality, of connection with the world, especially through the realization that they are still there, alive, and how extraordinary the mere awareness of existing can feel:
Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over […]
Odd, incredible; she had never been so happy. Nothing could be slow enough; nothing last too long. No pleasure could equal, she thought, straightening the chairs, pushing in one book on the shelf, this having done with the triumphs of youth, lost herself in the process of living, to find it, with a shock of delight, as the sun rose, as the day sank.
Woolf’s quote on life entering and imposing itself on a narrative focused on death seems to be particularly fitting to talk about one of her most famous essays, A Sketch of the Past, in which she coined the expression “moments of being” to define moments like the ones quoted above. As its title suggests, A Sketch of the Past is a sketch of Woolf’s memoirs, which she started writing in 1939 (two years before her death) as a distraction from the Roger Fry’s biography she was working on at that time.
In this essay, Woolf reflects on the issues related to the craft of autobiographical writing. Among the difficulties of writing a memoir, she identifies the amount of things one can remember; so that memories necessarily need to be examined and selected. What she does, then, is starting directly from her first memory — the one memory upon which her life, a “bowl that one fills and fills and fills”, stands. Woolf explains how struck she is at the realization that these pictures from her past still retain a strength, an impression which makes them “more real than the present moment”, to the point that when she loses herself in recalling them she sees the world “through the sight I saw here”.
Going back to the difficulties of writing a memoir, she explains that the peculiarity of these memories lies in the fact that they are oriented on the sensation she felt rather than on herself. She was just the container of the feeling of ecstasy she felt, and comes to the conclusion that this is possibly because these are childhood memories: as adults, our feelings become more complex, but for this reason less complete, less isolated and therefore less likely to have such a strong impact on ourselves. Possibly, I would add, this is also because a childhood memory brings with it the sense of something new, of a revelation, as one meets the emotion for the first time.
But the fact that a person doesn’t remember most things that happen in their life is a torment to Woolf, as she feels that “perhaps they are even more important” than the things one remembers.
One only remembers what is exceptional. And there seems to be no reason why one thing is exceptional and another not. Why have I forgotten so many things that must have been, one would have thought more memorable than what I do remember?
These reflections lead her to a conclusion which is at the core of her discourse: her life, our lives, she realizes, are marked by what she calls “moments of non-being”; moments that are lived unconsciously, as if in a “cotton wool”. A “moment of being”, on the contrary, is what stands out as significant against the cotton wool of non-being. It is a moment of full consciousness of reality, of awareness of one’s own existence, which, especially to children — but not necessarily, as she will explain later — can also take the shape of a shock so violent one will remember it all their life.
[…] Every day includes much more non-being than being. Yesterday for example, Tuesday the 18th of April, was [as] it happened a good day; above the average in "being". It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages; […] I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like- there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book- the memoirs of Madame de la Fayette — which interested me.
These separate moments of being were however embedded in many more moments of non-being. I have already forgotten what Leonard and I talked about at lunch; and at tea; although it was a good day the goodness was embedded in a kind of nondescript cotton wool. This is always so. A great part of every day is not lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees things, deals with what has to be done; the broken vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it is a bad day the proportion of non-being is much larger. I had a slight temperature last week; almost the whole day was non-being.
Rather than giving a proper definition of it, Woolf explains what a moment of being is through some memories from her childhood: in those days that mostly contained a large proportion of cotton wool, she can clearly remember a fight with her brother, and the sadness that overcame her as she realized that there was no reason to hurt another person. Then the shock, the paralysis at the news of the suicide of a person she had known, which is that first conscious realization of human mortality, that first conscious meeting with death which brings with it a sense of horror everyone faces at some point in their lives. But beyond death, the third memory Woolf mentions is a memory about life — “life breaking in as usual”, one could say: she recalls herself watching a flower bed in her garden and thinking “that is the whole”, realizing that those flowers, and everything else, herself included, were part of the wholeness of earth. Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway have similar moments of being in Mrs Dalloway:
They beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he, too, made the statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern.
But every one remembered; what she loved was this, here, now, in front of her; the fat lady in the cab. Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survived, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the trees at home; of the house there, ugly, rambling all to bits and pieces as it was; part of people she had never met; being laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist, but it spread ever so far, her life, herself.
The flower memory is the only one among those mentioned in front of which Woolf did not feel powerless, but rather inspired to explain it, and this need to provide an explanation coincides with the need to be a writer, because this explanation “blunts the sledge-hammer of the blow”. As an adult, through writing, Woolf has therefore managed to control these shocks, to explain them, to the point that they are what makes her a writer:
[…] though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are now always welcome; after the first surprise, I always feel instantly that they are particularly valuable. And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. […] I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; […] Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right making a character come together. From this, I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; 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.
Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.
If these moments of being are what defines her as a writer, Woolf is also critical of her inability to portray moments of non-being in her fiction as well: “The real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being. I think Jane Austen can; and Trollope; perhaps Thackeray and Dickens and Tolstoy. I have never been able to do both. I tried — in Night and Day; and in The Years.”
Nevertheless, this is the intuition which affected Woolf’s life and shaped her understanding of the meaning behind her activity as a writer: it is through these moments that her keenness of perception in front of humanity emerges in all its revelatory force. These moments of being, which can spring unexpectedly from an ordinary moment, manage to go beyond its surface and find a connection with a hidden pattern, and this vital connection is arguably what makes human life, and Virginia Woolf’s works on human life, art4.
What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Italian readers interested in the topic can find it exhaustively discussed in Leggere Woolf, Sara Sullam (Carocci, 2020).
The Diary of Virginia Woolf (vol. 2), edited by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie, (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Entry dated 17th February 1922.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (translated by William Trask, Princeton University Press, [1946] 1953), p. 537. Auerbach’s quote refers, like the rest of his analysis, to To the Lighthouse.
The last quote is from To the Lighthouse (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000), pp. 175-176.
“A great writer is a writer who manages to make us see things we know or feel, even unconsciously — and at times can relate to — as if for the first time” yesss i was actually annotating both Tolstoj and Austen on this concept these days!! the keenness of their observation of human behaviour, the way they translate it on the page
la reference alla Sullam >>