Moments of Being, Moments of Nonbeing: Humanism and Posthumanism in Virginia Woolf’s “A Sketch of the Past” and To the Lighthouse

While the achievements of Virginia Woolf have provided a rich site for decades of study from numerous critical angles, Woolf has largely been seen as a masterful narrator of psychological interiority. Her most widely read novels—Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)—plunge into the human psyche. Yet Woolf’s own working theory of psychology posits two main modes of consciousness between which we oscillate and in only one of which such interiority flourishes. According to Woolf’s theory, we pass most of our time in “moments of non-being,” living without really paying attention to what we think, see, and feel. Consequently, these details of life do not register in our minds or memories. Occasionally, however, we are jolted without warning into states of heightened awareness, or “moments of being.” These experiences become our most vivid memories. Woolf refers to this theory of moments of being and nonbeing throughout her career. For example, it surfaces in the title of the 1927 short story “Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points” and in her 1926 essay On Being Ill, although the latter text does not use those specific terms. Woolf’s theory of bifurcated modes of consciousness is formulated most thoroughly in her unfinished posthumous memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), which provides multiple examples of moments of being and nonbeing from her own childhood. Written in bursts from April 1939 to November 1940 and abandoned months before her death by suicide in March 1941, “A Sketch of the Past” is usually considered a source of information about Woolf’s painful childhood or about her mental state in her final years. When read on its own terms, however, this text is a fascinating meditation on the workings of mind and memory that proceeds through multiple overlapping registrations of the relationship between Woolf and her surroundings. To illustrate the distinction between moments of being and moments of nonbeing, Woolf hearkens back to her sojourns in St. Ives, the Cornish seaside village where she spent her childhood summers. “As a child then,” she writes, “my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of this cotton wool, this non-being. Week