virginia woolf/ A sketch of the Past

And so I go on to suppose that it isthe shock-receiving capacity that makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a tonken of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words....It is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we- I mean all human beings- are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare,there is not Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have shock.