I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory,
which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its
fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. [ ] the same
faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me
always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the
park--not from the house--as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do
so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement." [ ]
This is the opening of one of my favorite
passages in Nabokov's memoir -- where one particular memory, presented as a
silent film, comes to life with the addition of sound, culminating in "the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young
villagers [who remain unseen], like a background of wild applause."
I love the way the movement of the remembered faces (and later even their "mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech") shifts to
the dappled patterning of light and shade (a favorite motif of Nabokov's) and,
best of all, the mental tiptoeing of the narrator as he retraces, as quietly as
possible, the steps that will lead him back.
Jansy Mello: Indeed! "How do I love
thee? Let me count the ways" ( this is a line that carries me over to John
Shade's, only to show how wrong my association had been ), retrieving past
confessions and hilarious parlor games, as Walter Miale's
revived chicken. Or recovering G.M. Hopkins' pied beauty* ( I
think Nabokov only mentions this Jesuit poet's name once, in "Lolita", but I
often cannot avoid springing the two together, with more success than it happens
with Elizabeth Browning's poem ).
Beth and her baloons have lighted my day,
thanks!
One question, though. After I read Nabokov's "with the silent steps of a prodigal," I looked it up in
Speak,Memory searching for a misprint, because the absence
of "son" after "prodigal" surprised me - unless Nabokov was
all the time speaking from the perspective of the
biblical son on his way back home.
..............................................................................................................................................
*"Glory be to God for dappled things— / For skies of
couple-colour as a brinded cow; / For rose-moles all in
stipple upon trout that swim; / Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches'
wings; / Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; / And
áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim."