Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0024199, Wed, 8 May 2013 23:30:20 -0300

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Re: Cambridge as Chose (things & bridges)
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Alexey Sklyarenko: " Things and bridges are part of Ada's metaphysics: "An individual's life consisted of certain classified things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and priceless, simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and 'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though."

Jansy Mello: Perhaps they are not only part of Ada's metaphysics, but they may also reveal the author's experiences with world and words
While going through Nabokov's sentences to follow their variations in time and place, I became prejudiced in favor of VN's vivacious tropes. This prejudice led me to suppose that Ada's "bridges" and "towers," when they are rendered verbally, might also be indicative of metonymy and metaphor, the pillars of human remembrance and the "joys of life" ( but extraneous alusions, cross-references or recurrent themes, also form bridges and towers.)
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Wingstroke deals, almost exclusively, with "fogs" (frustration, despair, death, foggy brain, foggy hallucinations). Inspite of his denunciation of a ravaged homeland (lakes, woods, air, cities, lores) the short-story The wood-sprite is not a "fog," though, since memory and its registers preserve its lushious joy: "His voice literally blinded me. I felt dazzled and dizzy—I remembered the happiness, the echoing, endless, irreplaceable happiness.. [ ] his voice tintinnabulated, rustled—golden, luscious-green, familiar" And then, there's pathos, "compassion and beauty": "Silent are the orphaned bluebells that remain, by chance, unmown [ ] "It was we, Rus', who were your inspiration, your unfathomable beauty, your agelong enchantment! And we are all gone, gone, driven into exile by a crazed surveyor." Or the ecstatic synthesis in Sounds: :: " when I withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that—homogeneous, congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds of consonance: the trees, the water, you... [ ] it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving simultaneously [ ] ...I suddenly felt that, in place of arms, I possessed inclined branches covered with little wet leaves and, instead of legs, a thousand slender roots, twining into the earth, imbibing it. I wanted to transfuse myself thus into all of nature "

I hope you'll forgive me for quoting only arbitrary chunks of Nabokov's stories. Fact is that, "literally," "the enchanter interests me more than the yarn-spinner or the teacher"

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