“No matter has occurred, no matter goes to occur on the planet, it’s the residing second that comprises the sum of the joy, this second through which we contact life and all of the power of the previous and future,” the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote in certainly one of my favourite books a century after Kierkegaard asserted in his basic on nervousness that “the second isn’t correctly an atom of time however an atom of eternity… the primary reflection of eternity in time, its first try, because it have been, at stopping time.”
Given that almost each cell in your physique has modified for the reason that time you have been a baby, given that almost your whole values, wishes, and social ties are actually completely different, given that you’re, biologically and psychologically, a special individual from one second to the following, what makes you and the kid you have been the identical individual — what makes a self — is nothing greater than the thread of selective reminiscence and inner narrative stringing collectively essentially the most significant beads of expertise into the rosary of which means that’s your personhood.
Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) referred to as these beads “moments of being” — the “scaffolding within the background” of life, “invisible and silent” but shaping the foreground of expertise: our relationship to different individuals, our response to occasions, the issues we make with our palms and our minds in our day by day residing. Probably the most intensely felt of those moments, she believed, “have an existence unbiased of our minds; are actually nonetheless in existence”; we don’t name them to reminiscence — they name us into being. They’re the antipode of what she referred to as “non-being” — the lull of behavior and senseless routine that drags us by our days in a state of near-living.
In Moments of Being (public library) — the posthumous assortment of her autobiographical writings — she writes:
An ideal a part of day-after-day isn’t lived consciously. One walks, eats, sees issues, offers with what must be finished; the damaged vacuum cleaner; ordering dinner; writing orders to Mabel; washing; cooking dinner; bookbinding. When it’s a unhealthy day the proportion of non-being is way bigger.
In her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway — half love letter to those moments of being, half lamentation concerning the proportion of non-being we select with out understanding we’re selecting — she locates the important thing to righting the ratio in “the ability of taking maintain of expertise, of turning it spherical, slowly, within the mild.” Inserting one of many characters in a single such vivid second of being — “popping out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand” — she writes him pondering:
Life itself, each second of it, each drop of it, right here, this on the spot, now, within the solar, in Regent’s Park, was sufficient. An excessive amount of, certainly. An entire lifetime was too brief to convey out, now that one had acquired the ability, the total flavour; to extract each ounce of delight, each shade of which means.
This query of life’s fullness — what fills it, what syphons it, easy methods to stay when it overflows past what we are able to maintain — animates Woolf’s whole physique of labor. Within the spring of 1928, whereas engaged on her trailblazing novel Orlando (“which is wretched,” she informed her sister Vanessa in a letter, then wrote the connection between creativity and self-doubt into the novel itself) — she mirrored in her diary:
A bitter windy wet day… Life is both too empty or too full. Fortunately, I by no means stop to transmit these curious damaging shocks. At 46 I’m not callous; endure significantly; make good resolutions — nonetheless really feel as experimental & on the verge of getting on the fact as ever… And I discover myself once more within the driving whirlwind of writing in opposition to time. Have I ever written with it?
In a way, to stay within the second is at all times to stay in opposition to time. Woolf captured his with unusual splendor in one other autobiographical fragment:
The previous solely comes again when the current runs so easily that it’s just like the sliding floor of a deep river. Then one sees by the floor to the depths. In these moments I discover certainly one of my biggest satisfactions, not that I’m pondering of the previous; however that it’s then that I’m residing most totally within the current. For the current when backed by the previous is a thousand instances deeper than the current when it’s pressed so shut which you could really feel nothing else, when the movie on the digital camera reaches solely the attention. However to really feel the current sliding over the depths of the previous, peace is important. The current have to be easy, recurring. Because of this — that it destroys the fullness of life — any break — like that of home transferring — causes me excessive misery; it breaks; it shallows; it turns the depth into laborious skinny splinters.
As Woolf was pondering these lovely ideas and writing these lovely sentences, she was enduring common visitations the acute despair that may ultimately lead her to fill her coat-pockets with stones and wade into the river, by no means to return. She had come to the brink as soon as earlier than, in her twenties. That she lived to fifty-nine regardless of such struggling, that she wrote the flashes of eternity she did, is an astonishing achievement of the spirit — a testomony to her personal energy “of taking maintain of expertise, of turning it spherical, slowly, within the mild.”
It’s by her protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway that Woolf greatest captures these luminous constructing blocks of personhood:
Clarissa (crossing to the dressing-table) plunged into the very coronary heart of the second, transfixed it, there — the second of this June morning on which was the stress of all the opposite mornings, seeing the glass, the dressing-table, and all of the bottles afresh, gathering the entire of her at one level (as she appeared into the glass), seeing the fragile pink face of the girl who was that very night time to offer a celebration; of Clarissa Dalloway; of herself.
These moments, Woolf knew and devoted her life to having us know, are our greatest listening gadget for listening to the soul beneath the self — the soul that’s little greater than the standard of consideration we pay to being alive.
It was one such nearly painfully acute second of being whereas strolling by her backyard that lifted what Woolf referred to as “the cotton wool of day by day life” and sparked her epiphany about why she grew to become a author — a lens on a bigger fact about what it means to be an artist, an individual of artistic fireplace within the river of time — prompting her to exult within the revelation:
I attain… the thought… that behind the cotton wool is hidden a sample; that we — I imply all human beings — are linked with this; that the entire world is a murals; that we’re components of the murals. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the reality about this huge mass that we name the world. However there is no such thing as a Shakespeare, there is no such thing as a Beethoven; actually and emphatically there is no such thing as a God; we’re the phrases; we’re the music; we’re the factor itself.