She first mentions moments of being in her essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” which was to be the beginning of her memoirs. She begins with one of her earliest memories: a night in the nursery at St. Ives. She vividly recalls the way the blinds fluttered in the wind, the light coming through the window and the sound of the sea. She had a feeling of “lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” (65). This memory is so strong that when she recalls those sensations they become more real for her than the present moment.

This observation leads her 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: moments of being and non-being.

Woolf never explicitly defines what she means by “moments of being.” Instead she provides examples of these moments and contrasts them with moments of what she calls “non-being.” She describes the previous day as:

Above the average in ‘being.’ It was fine; I enjoyed writing these first pages . . . I walked over Mount Misery and along the river; and save that the tide was out, the country, which I notice very closely always, was coloured and shaded as I like–there were the willows, I remember, all plumy and soft green and purple against the blue. I also read Chaucer with pleasure; and began a book . . . which interested me. (70)

She experiences each of these acts intensely and with awareness. But she continues to say that these moments were embedded in more numerous moments of non-being. For example, she does not remember what she discussed with her husband over tea.

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 routine tasks 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 nondescript cotton wool” (70).

It is not the nature of the actions that separates moments of being from moments of non-being. One activity is not intrinsically more mundane or more extraordinary than the other. Instead, it is the intensity of feeling, one’s consciousness of the experience, that separates the two moments. A walk in the country can easily be hidden behind the cotton wool for one person, but for Woolf the experience is very vivid.

Woolf asserts that these moments of being, these flashes of awareness, reveal a pattern hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life, and that we, “I mean all human beings–are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.” But the individual artist is not important in this work. Instead she says of all people, “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (72).

Thus for Woolf a moment of being is a moment when an individual is fully conscious of his experience, a moment when he is not only aware of himself but catches a glimpse of his connection to a larger pattern hidden behind the opaque surface of daily life. Unlike moments of non-being, when the individual lives and acts without awareness, performing acts as if asleep, the moment of being opens up a hidden reality.