Jim Twiggs recommends, from the
LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, April 14, 2011 James Wood's review: After Lives: A Guide
to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory by John Casey and Casey's own book, ed. Oxford,
468 pp, £22.50, January 2010, ISBN 978 0 19 509295 0, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n08/james-wood/whats-next
As
a "Nabokov sighting" Twigg's report is about Wood's comment on Casey that:
"Curiously for a teacher of English, he neglects most of the literary dimension
after Milton...there is no mention here of Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, Bataille,
Patrick White, Beckett, Nabokov, Bellow, Spark, Marilynne Robinson, Saramago or
Coetzee...Nabokov’s work is shot through with a persistent mysticism; in Pnin,
the author imagines the dead watching us as ‘a democracy of ghosts’, sitting in
continuous session. Bellow’s work, especially Humboldt’s Gift, was strongly
influenced by Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy..." He also recommends John
Gray's recent book, The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange
Quest to Cheat Death. It contains no mention of VN but discusses at length F. W.
H. Myers and his circle of spiritualists, as well as a host of Russians, both
pre- and postrevolutionary...
John Gray on humanity's quest for immortality
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/08/john-gray-immortality;
Banville's review of Gray's book: Http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/29/healthmindandbody-history?INTCMP=SRCH and Richard
Holloway's review in The Observer: Http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/30/immortalization-commission-john-gray-review?INTCMP=SRCH
JM: So many experts on...what?
Nothingness? Interesting.
To add to Jim Twiggs' suggestions, I recommend
Locke's essay on "Human Understanding" to set his observations about
infinity in constrast to Nabokov's paradox (when, fortunately, he
didn't demand a "hereafter" solution): "When that
slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting
fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more
enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any
imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really
awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a
dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is
dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my
mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus
helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of
having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite
existence."