Moments Of Non-Being In 'To The Lighthouse' By Virginia Woolf

These moments of non-being, according to examples offered by Woolf herself, seem to refer to the events that occur but are not readily recalled. Woolf describes moments of being by explaining a day when she vividly remembered certain details about her walk along a river and enjoyed books by Chaucer and Madame de la Fayette (Woolf, 1939, p70). On the other hand, Woolf refers to moments of non-being using her example of lunch with her husband, Leonard, of which she could not remember their conversation. “A great part of every day is not lived consciously” she further says (Woolf, 1939, p70). These are unremembered, unconscious events that are part of everyone’s daily life, but are unable to be readily accessed by the mind, and this, of course, happens to all. In another aspect, this could also refer to the ways that someone’s mind wanders and gives one person alternative realities to live through. This ties back To the Lighthouse, when Mr. Bankes remembers his telephone conversation with Mrs. Ramsay. The reader is taken to a different time and place as a result of Mr. Bankes’ imagination. Woolf’s fascination with the possibility of representing a more complicated sense of reality is apparent early in ”To the Lighthouse“ to the point where Mr. Ramsay’s work is explained to Lily Briscoe by Andrew Ramsay. In The Window part, we learn that when Lily thinks of Mr. Ramsay’s work, she is reminded of a kitchen table as a result of Andrew’s description:
“It was Andrew’s doing”. She