The novel “Waves” is the most experimental, the most complex, the most mythopoetic of Woolf’s works… While working on “Waves,” Woolf wrote in her diary: “This should be an abstract mystical play: a play-poem.” A universal picture of existence is created; the outlines of a universe are traced—now illuminated by the sun, now plunged into darkness. Amid the raging elements of nature, human lives flash by like moths. At first, Woolf wanted to call this novel “The Moth.”