Arts Double Abyss
While drifting through digital space, I came across this passage from Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory:
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.”
The passage appears early in the book and is second in greatness to another passage that appears shortly after the middle of the memoir and describes, with marble smoothness, two lovers walking at night through an empty city. In the passage above, the English language and reality are almost one and the same.
Nabokov is, if possible, an underrated writer. Speak, Memory is a brilliant book; no less so than Lolita, or Pale Fire, or Pnin, or Despair, or really any of his novels. He is one of the most musical authors I have ever read, and has influenced my own writing more than any other writer.
And I am a _lawyer_ for goddess's sake! :-) I hope the Washington and federal Courts appreciated it.