Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0009998, Fri, 9 Jul 2004 12:29:22 -0700

Subject
TTRead Bergson (fwd)
Date
Body
---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Friday, July 09, 2004 9:11 AM -1000
From: Alain Andreu <AAndreu@ilm.pf>

------------------ I resend the message below, which was sent last week and
didn't appear in the discussion on chapter I. I noticed that there was no
reply concerning the Don's query on Bergson.

Yours,

AA
------------------------------------------

Your note regarding TIME in TT is interesting. And relevant for me
since I am writing an item on TIME in Nabokov's works...
I can say that VN shares the Bradley's ideas regarding this rejection of
the
Future.
This is not the only sample of VN 's opinion concerning this theme.
As everybody knows, in Ada the Future is called "sham time" by Van, who
rejects the Relativity theory, and explains Bergson's ideas on the
confusion between Time and Space, with an "Armada" of metaphors during
his travel to Mont Roux.
Concerning the Past, VN writes in Bend Sinister, that « theoretically
there is no absolute proof that one’s awakening in the morning (the
finding oneself again in the saddle of one’s personality) is not really a
quite unprecedented event , a perfectly original birth. » [6, p83 Vintage]
We find the same idea in The Analysis of Mind (B.Russell) when he
writes “
that the planet has been created a few minutes ago, furnished with a
humanity that remembers an illusory past”, and in Tlön Uqbar Orbis
Tertius, the famous short story of J.L.Borges.

I hope that my forthcoming item , translated into a correct English, will
be more
clear and explicit.



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D. Barton Johnson
NABOKV-L