Moments of Being and the Everyday
This chapter examines the most convincing affinities in terms of Woolf and Heidegger’s understandings of Being-in-the-world. Drawing attention to Woolf and Heidegger’s respective notions of ‘moments of Being’ and ‘moments of vision’, the ways in which such moments are triggered by particular moods that are experienced by the individual are discussed. Disrupting the individual’s everyday inauthentic immersion in the preoccupations and prescriptions of the present, such moments provide the potential for the disclosure of the typically concealed extraordinary nature of the ordinary. This chapter begins with a discussion of the significance and history of the literary epiphany, and draws attention to the influence of precursors such as Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad and William Wordsworth upon Woolf’s writings. In the second section, attention is directed to a number of Heideggerian notions – including ‘anxiety’, ‘nothingness’, ‘boredom’, ‘wonder’ and the ‘numinous’ – in terms of their relations to the Woolfian ‘moment’.