Moment's of Being is a unique and frightening book, but it isn't the kind of fright generated for effect - the smoke and mirrors of the horror writer's game - but genuinely frightening - partly because the substance of the book is not in the least gotten up to entertain you. Instead, it is a work in which the acutely sensitive instrument of Ms. Woolf's mind is set to work ferreting out the essence of life's meaning, and her effort was subtle enough that it wasn't until sometime after reading the book that I understood it. It needed time to sink into my consciousness, but once it had done so the effect was profound. I felt that something in it had both skirted the boundaries of human understanding and touched the root of my being. It carried my beyond the boundary of the unknown.
The book is hard to classify - being neither memoir, fiction, essay, nor philosophical treatise - it instead a bit of all these things. The frightening aspect of the book lies in the spiritual realization it achieves at first slowly, almost prosaically. Only bit by bit do we realize when Ms. Woolfe looks into a room she doesn't see just its furnishings, or even just characters within, but spiritual entities of great mystery. Her analysis of character penetrates to the very essence of the people in her book (including herself) and what she discovers is mixed, but on the whole it is a revelation of both her life and theirs to be shockingly insensate to the profound mystery unfolding about them, and least of all are they aware that they themselves represent the heart of that mystery. Things here presenting themselves as established fact gradually are seen to mean nothing at all. Relationships at first first substantial reveal themselves to be superficial - so much so they acquire the insubstantiality of smoke and mirrors, until the reader is left wondering if anything in their lives has any meaning at all.
The very limited action of the book is set in a very limited physical world - mostly in the narrator's own home and once on a trip to the beach.. What we don't see is what we see in so much fiction: action, mystery, staged horror, or romance. The character's seemingly prosaic lives and commonplace relationships are what gradually form the horror of the book. It is that their relationships are so utterly, so commonplace and tragically devoid of meaning, of anything really substantial at all, and by implication that this is what so much of our own lives, of our seemingly precious time is wasted and lost in endless banality.
Only occasionally, very occasionally, is this alienation cutting deeper then a knife relieved by flashes of great insight and revelation. Amid the commonplace events, like scattered stars in and eternally vast night, these moments of true being come to us, moments of profound insight or communion. Life is, in these amazing but all too brief moments, as we would like it to be. Life is buoyant, is ebullient, is lit with the incandescence of enlightenment. To the narrator of the book these flashing moments of vision equal half a lifetime of the typical drudgery of life. To the reader with imagination such disillusionment and alienation is indeed a frightening thing to contemplate, and Ms. Woolf doesn't leave us with any solace, nor advise, nor optimism - nor even pessimism really - regarding this dark existential vision. She merely presents us with it and we alone are faced with the task of making life as meaningful as we can, of struggling for a life that doesn't pass us by, almost without our being aware of it.
Brent Hightower
Copyright 2017 Brent Hightower
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