Moments of Being, by Virginia Woolf

In this collection of autobiographical essays, Woolf separates her “moments of being” from the “cotton wool of daily life.” As a child, these moments of acute awareness caused her pain and despair. Later, when she learned to provide explanations for the newfound awareness that came out of these moments of acute awareness, they became less painful and she began to see her “shock receiving capacity” as part of what made her a writer:

…as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the [realization of the moment of being]. I think this is true, because though I still have the peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks, they are not 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. (72)

She finds it particularly exciting to set down in writing an explanation for the ‘shock.’ This makes it whole and removes its power to cause harm,

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... (72)

In fact, creating a coherent whole gives her great pleasure:

…it gives me … great delight to put the severed parts together. 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. (72)

Clearly, Woolf is heavily invested personally and emotionally in what she writes. Not only does she feel rapture, for her writing is a palliative. She mentions how writing To the Lighthouse helped her deal with unresolved feelings she had concerning her parents, particularly concerning her mother, but also to some extent her father, though she hoped to exorcise more of her feelings for him through writing the essays in Moments of Being.

She also addresses the nature of writing biographies, perhaps because much of this work consists of descriptions of people living or dead who inhabited her past. She writes that the written word can never do a person justice:

Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life. You will not find in what I say, or again those sincere but conventional phrases in the life of your grandfather, or in the noble lamentations with which he fills the pages of his autobiography, any semblance of a woman whom you can love. (36)

Regarding the difficulty of revisiting the past in one’s mind, she describes the state of life that is most conducive for her to remember the past:

The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. (98)

Finally, she sees the greatest works of art within all people: Shakespeare is in everything; Beethoven is in all people. She writes,

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. (72)