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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Three
Spring 2004
Finding “Being” through “Non-Being" - Page 2
by
Rachelle Wander
Instead of describing how she acted and reacted towards her family, Woolf only discusses how her family acted towards her in order to show the powerful influence those close to her had on shaping her person. For example, her half-sister, Stella, played a major part in her upbringing, especially in building confidence and love. Woolf remembers, “And she laughed, tenderly, very gently, and kissed me and said, ‘Oh lots of people are in love as we are. You and Nessa will be one day . . . You must expect people to look at you both’” (105). Likewise, her beloved sister, Vanessa, acted the role as a confidant and vice versa. Woolf writes, “And when [Vanessa] won the prize at her drawing school, she hardly knew, so shy was she, at the recognition of a secret, how to tell me, in order that I might repeat the news at home” (30). As a source for academic knowledge and the main influence in her interest in Greek culture, Woolf’s brother, Thoby often told her stories from his university texts as well as about his friends and the world outside of her sheltered existence she had been forced to endure as a child and adolescent. All three of these family members acted positively toward Woolf as their devotion to her fulfilled her need for love and affection essential in building a strong identity.
Notably, Woolf’s description of each family member focuses on childhood events. Because none of the three writings ever discuss her life past the age of twenty-two, it is clear that Woolf remains focused on understanding her childhood in order to face her future, and possibly death (Albright 1). Not only is this childhood fixation evident in the events she chose to discuss, but in her earliest recollected memory as well. Her first memory recalls one morning, while lying half asleep as a toddler in the nursery at her summer home and hearing the sea waves break, how she sees the early morning light pass through the yellow blind, and hears the wind drag an acorn across the sill. It is a memory of “pure ecstasy” (Woolf 65). Woolf writes, “in fact it is the most important of all my memories” because “if life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills ¾ then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory” (64). Used as an attempt to understand the basis of her identity, this memory becomes the “foundation of her existence” as she returns to it again and again throughout this section (Albright 9). Since Woolf commences with her first memory, she captures the initial steps toward identity formation. Then, she compares this first memory of lying in the nursery at St. Ives one summer morning to “lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” (Woolf 65). Woolf’s comparison of herself in a pre-natal state and her first memory shows her belief that this memory was her first moment of “being,” her conception. The connection between this first memory and feeling as if she were in a womb-like bubble only emphasizes the base at which she starts her journey of childhood comprehension. Albright explains, “many of the passages in the diary and in the novels in which there is exultation, self-expansion, a sense of merging with the cosmos, seem to appeal to this primal memory” (9). Throughout “A Sketch of the Past,” any time Woolf focuses on self exploration she seems to recall her first memory, her foundation of “being.” Because Woolf’s first moment of “being” occurs when she was a toddler, she could not understand the significance of the moment until reaching a more mature age, and possibly only while writing. It is not until years later, as a young child, while playing amongst the garden at St. Ives and observing a single flower does she have an initial understanding of something evocative happening. Although she had to “put [the idea] away as being likely to be very useful to [her] later,” Woolf’s vision of the flower forced her to realize “that is the whole” (71). In other words, that image “shocked” her into an understanding, which caused her to be aware that there is a broader vision to life beyond her own. Here she realizes a moment of “being,” and begins to make concrete this abstract feeling of a union between herself and the world at large. This realization is important for her to appreciate when each of these “being” moments occur in her life as she reflects upon her past. Only as she reaches maturity can Woolf pinpoint the pattern in past “being” moments. It is her hindsight that makes it possible for her to better understand her past self and subsequently to be able to acknowledge any future moments of “being.” By realizing these moments existed in her childhood gives meaning to her life as an adult. The connection between these moments and the world at large allows Woolf to establish not only her role in the world, but also the role the world has on her identity formation.
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