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“Virginia Woolf had her own term for such ‘shocks’ of memory. She calls them ‘moments of being,’ and they become essential to our very sense of self. They are the times when we get jolted out of our everyday complacency to really see the world and all that it contains. This shock-receiving capacity is essential for the writer’s disposition. ‘I hazard the explanation,’ she writes, ‘that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. … I make it real by putting it into words.’ Woolf’s early moments of being, the vivid first memories from childhood, are of the smallest, most ordinary things: the pattern of her mother’s dress, for example, or the pull cord of the window blind skittering across the floor of their beach house.”
Brenda Miller, from Tell It Slant, with Suzanne Paola (McGraw Hill, 2012)
