flood of life

At the end of class, I was excited that we had a few (very short) minutes to read a small bit from Woolf's diary.  The first part of this passage, "Now is life very solid, or very shifting?" is an idea that continues throughout The Waves.  This excerpt from her diary is also connected to this sentence on page 167
"And we ourselves, walking six abreast, what do we oppose, with this random flicker of light in us that we call brain and feeling, how can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence?"

I am unable to receive credit for linking these two ideas together - the back of the book did all of the connecting work for me, but hopefully I can offer some interesting comments.  "How can we do battle against this flood; what has permanence?" directly relates to the idea that life is shifting instead of solid.  This seems like yet another moment where Bernard realizes that battling against the flood of moments in life is essentially useless, yet he still seems to have hope that some sort of battle can be raged.  Until the end of the novel, Bernard believes that his words and phrases will eventually have permanence in the form of a book, but then he throws all of his phrases away proving that the battle cannot be won with words alone.
 I assert a claim here that the flood is composed of many moments of non-being, and permanence is achieved with moments of being - which cannot be captured with spoken words.  The novel, to me, is comprised of the characters speaking their thoughts in their head, which the reader then reads silently in his/her head so moments of being and non-being are transferred silently without verbally speaking the words.  Thus, Bernard is unable to turn his thoughts into spoken words that convey the same meanings and feelings.  Sure, he can write down his moments of being, but they will not have the same impact to others as they do to him making his efforts seem futile.
 This last idea kind of ties in...I was just trying to think of why Woolf chose to name it The Waves - besides the obvious reasons of course...although this conclusion could be considered rather obvious... ˆLife is filled with many times of non-being (waves, if you will) and a few moments of being (when the wave crashes upon the shore).