Virginia Woolf is recognize as one of the great innovators of Modern fictions. Her experiments with point of view have influenced many writers that follow her, but one particulary interesting tecnique that doesn't seem to receive much attention is her use of moments of being.
...To wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorable - even if the events themselves are unimportant - that they can vivigly recalled, while other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences: moments of being or moments of not being.
Virginia Woolf explicity never defines what she means by moments of being. Instead she provides examples of this moments and contrasts them with moments of what she calls "not being".
Moments of not being appear to be moments that the individual is not concsciously aware of even as she experiences them. She notes that people perform routines such as walking and shopping witout thinking about that. This part of their life is "not lived consciously", but instead is embeded in "a kind of unon-descript cotton wool" (il testo è come un tessuto). It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moments of not being.