Just Because: 'Speak, Memory'

April 22 is an important date not just because it's Earth Day, but also because it's the birthday of writer par excellence Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). Although he is most famous for his novel Lolita (which was made into an equally excellent movie in 1962), he wrote 18 novels and novellas, the first 9 in his native Russian, innumerable short stories, plays, and poems. He also translated many works, including Lolita, which he translated from its original English to Russian, because, as he explained, "... I saw that every paragraph, pock-marked as it is with pitfalls, could lend itself to hideous mistranslation." The fact is, the man was a genius with language, with words, with combining words to form double- and triple-entendres and wicked puns.
   And here, I must share the line from Lolita that continues to tickle me all these years later. It, unfortunately, is in French and kind of untranslatable, but for those who understand French, it's just fun. Humbert Humbert is ringing the doorbell of Lolita's house: "Personne. Je resonne. Repersonne." Just a miniscule glimpse of the man's facility with and love of language ~ and his sense of humor.
   In 1951, Nabokov published Speak, Memory, an autobiography whose chapters had been previously published as short stories in various magazines, mostly the New Yorker. It is subtitled An Autobiography Revisited. In his Foreword, Nabokov wrote, "The present work is a systematically correlated assemblage of personal recollections ranging geographically from St. Petersburg to St. Nazaire, and covering thirty-seven years, from August 1903 to May 1940, with only a few sallies into later space-time."
   (Reading the first paragraph, it is hard for me not to think back on the recent post about the challenges of giftedness [http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2015/04/brilliant-shadows.html], and particularly the difficulties inherent in seeing The Big Picture, especially when one is young and emotionally incapable of dealing with it.)

Speak, Memory

One

I

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.
   Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.
   I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in the impersonal darkness of both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by
the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.
   Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one's eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers and speech more or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine. Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother's birthday, in late summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I received. All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time.
   ...