What is a Snob?
One of essays in this collection is titled “What is a Snob.” Fortunately, one doesn’t have to wait long to find out the answer to this question. Woolf reaches straight for metaphor to craft a wonderfully illustrative answer, rich in humorous imagery that, nevertheless, fully answers the question to satisfaction.
“The snob is a flutter-brained, hare-brained creature so little satisfied with his or her own standing that in order to consolidate it he or she is always flourishing a title or an honor in other people’s faces so that they may believe, and help him to believe what he does not really believe – that he or she is somehow a person of importance.”
Memory Mechanics
According to Woolf in the section titled “A Sketch of the Past” memory for her is dependent on the present working in conjunction with recollection. The relationship between the two is like a machine in which the moving parts must be working at peak efficiency in the present in order to facilitate a full and penetrating analysis of the past. Of course, she puts it much more poetically:
“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river.”
Autobigraphy
Woolf describes as “invisible presences” those aspects of society which play upon the development of a person and how a biography suffers if a writer lacking access cannot analyze those forces. From projecting outward as biographer, she suddenly turns inward as subject of biography and creates metaphor for this condition both beautiful in its lyricism and tangible in its imagery:
“I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream”
Woolf's Philosphy
It is in Moments of Being that Woolf outlines what she terms her philosophy (or, at the very least, an idea at play in her mind at all times) that she could only arrive at through the process of writing. Life is
“hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”
Woolf on Display
In a passage about her sister, Vanessa, Woolf taps into the full strength of her artistry, revealing with mysterious hidden depths the heights to which she was capable of stringing words together in prose to create something much more akin to poetry. One need not know, understand or even care about the context to appreciate the imagery constructed here in metaphor. It is typical of the fragmented sense of reality that Woolf would consciously work to perfect over the course of her writing career as she takes what is, after all, a simile built upon an image so familiar as to be trite and tweaks it with an unexpected addition that lets it take a left turn down a course far off the path of the mundane from where it started.
“We drifted together like ships in an immense ocean and she asked me whether black cats had tails. And I answered that they had not, after a pause in which her question seemed to drop echoing down vast abysses, hitherto silent.”
