1. One distinction that should be noted regarding the modernist epiphany in comparison to Zen Awakening is that, at least for writers like Joyce, modernist concepts of time are rooted in Western philosophy and religion. What this means is that for many Westerners such as Plato, Augustine, the Symbolists, and the Romantics, timelessness, because it requires a lack of change, is not achievable in the changing physical world. Epiphany, as a result, is often some kind of greater spiritual manifestation of “another world”—a world of dreams, for example. Furthermore, for some like the Symbolists, certain symbols and words have the ability to evoke this epiphanic moment. In Zen, “Awakening” is in this world. While change is the world’s real state in Zen, it is also only perceivable when compared to such illusion as past and future. This is one reason that Nirvana can be both a place of change and a place of no change, of all time and no time. Though obviously influenced by Zen, especially in the way transcendence in Phillips’s work often appears in this world, Phillips, at least in terms of her faith in language, seems philosophically more in tune with the modernists.