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 Midway through the opening section of To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe observes her hosts, the Ramsays, as they watch their children play catch. For a fleeting moment she sees the couple as representational rather than individual; the scene flush with meaning; "the symbols of marriage, husband and wife." And then, as quickly as it manifested, "the symbolic outline which transcended the real figures sank down again, and they became ... Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey watching the children throwing catches" (111).

 In the absence of any major plot, the ebb and flow of these privileged moments constitute the work's most notable shape. Woolf is able to achieve instances of transcendence because they sit side by side with the ordinary. Much of the text deals with the minutiae of its character's trivial and repetitive interiority, until, through a variety of methods, Woolf creates or illuminates meaning, meaning which always seems to ascend from the nondescript. As with Lily's brief vision of the Ramsays' translucent symbolism, these instances always involves a modulation between the shapeless abstract and the textured specific. Woolf's effectiveness lies in her ability to slip between these two modes. Her moments of heightened meaning can be understood as being in conversation with the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Using Woolf's autobiographical essay, "A Sketch of the Past," as a guide, in combination with various writings of Emerson, allows us to examine the form and function of the revelations contained in To the Lighthouse.

 In "A Sketch of the Past," Woolf delineates the two categories which make up all experience: moments of being and moments of non-being. The moments of being, for Woolf, are those which are somehow infused with meaning or interest--her reading, her writing, a walk among the willows "all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue" (70). The rest of one's days, those parts which recede from memory as quickly as they occur, are moments of non-being. Woolf describes this non-being as a sort of cotton wool which envelopes the more infrequent significant moments. She believes that "behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern," and that all human beings are connected through that pattern.

 "Revelation is the disclosure of the soul," writes Emerson, in "The Over-Soul" (200). He conceptualizes the "soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related" (190). This universality links everyone, and everything, just as Woolf's hidden pattern does. Revelation is "always attended by the emotion of the sublime," and just like Woolf's moments of being, "every moment when the individual feels himself invaded by [the soul], is memorable" (198-9).

 After the overlayed significance fades from around the Ramsays, Woolf writes that "still, for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball soared high, and they followed it and lost it and saw one star and the draped branches. In the failing light they all looked sharp edged and ethereal and divided by great distances" (111). In this passage we see the elements of the scene both separate and entangled. The ball connects to the Ramsays' vision, which connects to the star and the draped branches. Yet still, the edges remain distinct and distant.

 In her essay "Virginia Woolf's Emersonian Metaphors of Sight in To the Lighthouse," Rosemary Luttrell talks about an oscillation between two sorts of vision, close and distant. We can see the ball and stars as examples of these two distances--both literally and symbolically. Not only is the ball physically close and the stars physically far, but the ball connects to mundane familial life, while the stars suggest the heavens, an eternal scale. This is not the only point in the novel where expanded distance suggested expanded time. When Paul and Minta return from the beach before dinner, they emerge onto a hilltop and see the blinking windows of the town below. In Paul's eyes "the lights coming out suddenly one by one seemed like things that were going to happen to him--his marriage, his children, his house." This vision is activated by the oscillating between the close and the distant; Minta "pressing close to his side," and "the lights of the town beneath them" (118).

 In "Self-Reliance," Emerson describes the zigzagged path of a ship, forced to tack by the confluence of its heading and the prevailing winds. When seen at close hand the ship's movement appears erratic, however, from "sufficient distance" the path becomes straight as an arrow (42). "Since both truths (the crooked line and the straight path) exist simultaneously," Luttrell notes, "the subject can acknowledge them both without negating either one" (72). Similarly, since both the mundane (non-being) and transcendent (being) exist simultaneously, writing truthfully requires a negotiation between them which doesn't collapse or erase either. Woolf explains in "A Sketch of the Past" that "the real novelist can somehow convey both sorts of being" (70). Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay are the two characters who, as surrogates for Woolf, are most actively engaged with this negotiation. In twin sections the novel, Lily's painting functions as a analogue for fiction writing. For Woolf, color and memory are deeply connected, so this substitution is apt--remember the willows, "all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue" (70)?

 In describing her earliest memory, she imagines herself in front of a canvas: "If I were a painter I should paint these first impressions in pale yellow, silver, and green. There was a pale yellow blind; the green sea; and the silver of the passion flowers. I should make a picture of curved petals; of shells; of things that were semi-transparent; I should make curved shapes, showing the light through, but not giving a clear outline" (66). For Woolf, color represents an irreducible truth. This is evident from the way Lily thinks about her painting. "The jacmanna was bright violet; the wall staring white. She would not think it honest to tamper with the bright violet and the staring white, since she saw them like that" (31-2). This commitment to veracity is mirrored by the novel's allegiance to its character's conflicting interiority, and to its reproduction of the finer details of the two days it describes.

 In the latter half of the novel, when Lily thinks of the Rayleys--Paul and Minta, now unhappily married--she sees their lives "in a series of scenes," which arise fully out of her own imagination, yet constitute the true sum of how she understands them. This is remarkably reminiscent of how Woolf describes her recollection of the past, where "a scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative" (142). Lily imagines this scene as she squeezes a tube of green paint, and the connection to representation is crucial. Her attempt, conscious or not, to transmit the changes of the past ten years to canvas bring to mind the imagined (yet true) portrait of Paul and Minta. Woolf acknowledges that her ability to recollect or invent a representative scene is a part of her creative process. The ready availability of these scenes confirm Woolf's "instinctive notion ... that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a scene" (142). These tableaux are no different than Emerson's revelations: singular and specific moments which gesture towards and expose the larger whole.

 In "Nature," his most famous essay, Emerson describes becoming "a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God." This experience is brought on by a focused engagement with nature; training one's attention on the external brings about a dissolution of the internal. Mrs. Ramsay experiences a similar ego-death as she contemplates the beam of the lighthouse. "Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at" (97). This merging with the lighthouse provides a sense of calm, and a moment of respite. "Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness." In this "wedge of darkness," "there was a freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability" (96). This acceptance, and summoning together, reflects the revelation, again, of the pattern behind the cotton wool. Emerson writes in "The Over-Soul" that "the only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares the advancing soul has built and forged itself a new condition, and the question and the answer are one" (201).

 It is important to note that Mrs. Ramsey's privileged moment involves not only attention to the beam of the lighthouse, but also to her knitting. Randi Koppen, in "Embodied Form: Art and Life in Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse'," notes the novel's "insistence of bodily experience which serves to ground the abstractions in the body rather than transform the body/life/world out of existence" (380). The transcendent metaphysical experience does not sever Mrs. Ramsay from her corporeal self--in fact, the emotional reality is firmly grounded in the simultaneous accomplishment of "something dexterous with her needles" (96).

 With this perspective, Koppen examines the novel's modest climax, in which Lily completes her painting. Koppen notes the "close connection that exists between the artistic act, the rhythms of the bodily movement, and the physical world" (382). The action of Lily's painting is described by Woolf as a "dancing rhythmical movement;" she moves "her brush hither and thither" (238). The painting functions as symbol which emerges from the physical. In fact, it is twice tied to the physical: once by the movement of the body and once by the subjects which are represented. Lily paints with a rhythm that is "dictated to her ... by what she saw" (238).

 The passage in which the Ramsays are transfigured into their symbolic value as husband and wife is also quoted by Koppen, who is interested in "the idea that life offers up design," or, said differently, the idea symbolic truth emerges out of the texture of everyday. Luttrell quotes from Emerson's essay "the Transcendentalist" to describe this same idea:

... the idealist "does not deny the sensuous fact: by no means; but he will not see that alone. He does not deny the presence of this table, this chair, and the walls of this room, but he looks at these things as the reverse side of the tapestry, as the other end, each being a sequel or completion of a spiritual fact which nearly concerns him." While the material fact is a completion of the spiritual fact -- the spiritual fact's "sequel" -- our perspective must work in reverse; it is by moving first through and then beyond the natural world that we can intuit spiritual laws. But we must return to the natural world of concrete words and images in order to express what we perceive when we move beyond them. (72)

 Both Lily Briscoe and Woolf struggle to use the "natural world of concrete words and images" to describe these privileged moments. In prose, and in poetry, I experience descriptions of the transcendent, or "spiritual fact," as a sort of telescoping, a zooming in or zooming out which can leave me experiencing vertigo. Small trivialities, rooted in specific, reality snowball into each other, until without warning significance swells. Whether this is an oscillation between the physical and the metaphysical, or the near and the distant, or the trivial and the transcendent, it always requires a simultaneous acknowledgment of two separate senses of scale. In the first half of the novel, before dinner, Nancy observes a tide pool. First "she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales," and then, "letting her eyes slide imperceptibly above the pool and rest on that wavering line of sea and sky, on the tree trunks which the the smoke of steamers made waver on the horizon, she became with all that power sweeping savagely in and inevitably withdrawing, hypnotized, and the two senses of that vastness and this tininess (the pool had diminished again) flowering within it made her feel like she was bound hand and foot and unable to move by the intensity of feelings which reduced her own body, her own life, and the lives of all the people in the world, for ever, to nothingness" (114-5). Again, like the ball Prue throws, Woolf diligently follows her character's perspective, drawing a line from the minnows in the tide pool, to the sharks and whales and steamships which inhabit the Atlantic. And the simultaneous perception of both scales connect Nancy to the lives of "all the people in the world," even in their meaninglessness. (Koppen would likely want me to note that the textual journey from tide pool to connected human population requires Nancy's own body as an intermediary.)

 In big ways and small ways, Woolf builds meaning from accumulation. In her view, life consists of the sum of each moment. She describes life, in "A Sketch of the Past," as "a bowl that one fills and fills and fills" (64). In the novel, Lily Briscoe recognizes in "Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach" (73). In this moment of revelation, Lily consolidates three disconnected elements in her field of vision, and extrapolates from them the interconnectivity of all of life's specificity. Emerson writes of a universality which "connects everyone, and everything, but is largely hidden, since we understand the world "piece by piece"" (190). This then is the work of the painter, or the novelist--to stitch together enough of these seemingly disconnected pieces, until she has traced an outline sufficient to signal the enormity of the whole. Lily imagines, as she finishes the painting, that one wants "to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy" (300). Again and again, Woolf makes visible for the reader not only the cotton wool, but also the shimmering layer of meaning which lays atop it.