Clarissa’s guiding life philosophy seems to be one that vests the highest value in individual moments and individual people. While she proclaims that it is her gift “to combine, to create” (122), I get the sense that her job of bringing people together resembles more the weaving of connections between individuals rather than the melding of individuals into a single new amalgam. Her party has the same crowd-like feeling of the street: many people united by the circumstance of being in the same place at the same time yet each permitted to retain unique, often contradictory, points of view. Woolf contrasts this idea with the more tyrannical philosophy of Dr. Holmes, Sir William Bradshaw, Lady Bruton, and Miss Kilman. All of these figures worship “Conversion,” who, as we saw last class, “feasts on the wills of the weakly, loving to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace” (100). Clarissa, quite contrarily, refuses to impose any particular vision on the people around her; we see this aversion to forcing people into boxes early on when, walking down the street, Clarissa admits that “she would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that…and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that (8-9). She intentionally keeps things undefined, as with the vagueness of “the thing there was that mattered” (184), for the attempt to find certainty and impose definitions is contrary to the very idea of life.

Clarissa’s philosophy, then, is anti-agenda. She calls Miss Kilman her enemy (174) because Kilman has made it her mission to force her religion upon Elizabeth; she thinks Bradshaw evil because he can use his power to blunt the passions and twist the souls of his patients (184). Clarissa sees value rather in letting life be as it is. Her sort of non-intrusive voyeuristic relationship with the old lady who lives across the way especially illustrates her belief that real life is found where “the privacy of the soul” (126) remains untouched by outside agendas. Woolf beautifully communicates this idea in the following passage, which appears just after Kilman and Elizabeth have left for the Stores:

Why creeds and prayers and mackintoshes?, when, thought Clarissa, that’s the miracle, that’s the mystery; that old lady, she meant, whom she could see going from chest of drawers to dressing-table. She could still see her. And the supreme mystery which Kilman might say she had solved, or Peter might say he had solved, but Clarissa didn’t believe either of them had the ghost of an idea of solving, was simply this: here was one room; there another. Did religion solve that, or love? (127)

It is old women like this, going about their ordinary private business undisturbed and unimposing in their own pockets of the world, that we might think of when Clarissa thinks, “What she liked was simply life” (121).