MOMENT OF BEING 

Virginia Woolf is recognize as one of the great innovators of modern fiction. Her experiments with point of view have influenced many writers that followed her. But one particularly interesting technique that doesn’t seem to receive much attention is her use of moment of being.

..to wonder why some moments are so powerful and memorable – even if the events themselves are unimportant – that they can be vividly recalled while other events are easily forgotten. She concludes that there are two kinds of experiences: moment of being and (moment) of non being.

Virginia Woolf never explicated / never defines what she means by moment of being. Instead she provides examples of these moments and contrasts them with moment of what she calls non being.

Moments of non being appear to be moments that the individual is not consciously aware of even as she experiences them.

She notes that people perform routines such as walking and shopping without thinking about them. This part of the life is “not lived consciously” but instead is embedded in “a kind of non descript cotton wool” it is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moments of non-being.