Art is about creating the perfect composition. Life is about overcoming division and strife. Philosophy can be divisive but lets us understand the role of objects in historical change. In the middle section of the book, Woolf makes objects come alive in order to illustrate the changes of WWI: their own special sort of decay both underscores the different kind of violence of war (evolution v revolution) and creates a parallel between the destruction of life by war and of objects by time. War is a violent manifestation of time that makes the natural work of time go by more quickly. But it ultimately is the same kind of wear and tear once understood in its influence on the human psyche.