According to the spectral narrators in VN's novel Transparent Things (1972), the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought:
Here's the person I want. Hullo, person! Doesn't hear me.
Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future. Persons might then straddle the middle stretch of the seesaw when considering this or that object. It might be fun.
But the future has no such reality (as the pictured past and the perceived present possess); the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought.
Hullo, person! What's the matter, don't pull me. I'm not bothering him. Oh, all right. Hullo, person . . . (last time, in a very small voice).
When we concentrate on a material object, whatever its situation, the very act of attention may lead to our involuntarily sinking into the history of that object. Novices must learn to skim over matter if they want matter to stay at the exact level of the moment. Transparent things, through which the past shines!
Man-made objects, or natural ones, inert in themselves but much used by careless life (you are thinking, and quite rightly so, of a hillside stone over which a multitude of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons) are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus: novices fall through the surface, humming happily to themselves, and are soon reveling with childish abandon in the story of this stone, of that heath. I shall explain. A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film. Otherwise the inexperienced miracle-worker will find himself no longer walking on water but descending upright among staring fish. More in a moment. (Chapter One)
Specter is an anagram of respect. At the beginning of VN's story Ultima Thule (1942) the narrator addresses a deceased person and says: "Prizrachno vash (Respecterfully yours)." "Ostayus' s privideniem (I remain your specterful)" in VN's Parizhskaya poema ("The Paris Poem," 1943) is a play on ostayus' s uvazheniem (I remain your respectful):
"Отведите, но только не бросьте.
Это -- люди; им жалко Москвы.
Позаботьтесь об этом прохвосте:
он когда-то был ангел, как вы.
И подайте крыло Никанору,
Аврааму, Владимиру, Льву, --
смерду, князю, предателю, вору:
ils furent des anges comme vous.
Всю ораву, ужасные выи
стариков у чужого огня,
господа, господа голубые,
пожалейте вы ради меня!
От кочующих, праздно плутающих
уползаю, и вот привстаю,
и уже я лечу, и на тающих
рифмы нет в моем новом раю.
Потому-то я вправе по чину
к вам, бряцая, в палаты войти.
Хорошо. Понимаю причину --
но их надо, их надо спасти.
Хоть бы вы призадумались, хоть бы
согласились взглянуть. А пока
остаюсь с привидением (подпись
неразборчива: ночь, облака)".
“Lead them off, only do not discard them!
They are human. Their Moscow they rue.
Give some thought to the needs of that scoundrel:
He was once an angel like you.
And extend a wing to Nicander,
Abram, Vladimir, and Leo, too;
to the slave, prince, traitor, bandit:
ils furent des anges comme vous.
The whole crew—at an alien fireside
(those ghastly necks of old men):
masters, my azure masters,
for my sake have pity on them!
From those wandering, those idly straying,
I now crawl away, and now rise,
and I’m flying at last—and ‘dissolving’
has no rhyme in my new paradise.
That is how by rank I’m entitled
with loud clangor to enter your hall.
Very well. I’m aware of the reason—
but they must be rescued all!
You at least might reflect, you at least might
condescend to glance briefly - Meanwhile
I remain your specterful (signature
illegible. Night. Cloudy sky)."
VN's Notes: Line 13: Ot kochúyushchih, prázdno plutáyushchih. The original imitates much more closely Nekrasov’s line calling the poet away “from those jubilant, those idly babbling” (ot likuyúshchih, prázdno boltáyushchih) to the camp (stan) of those revolutionaries “who perish in the name of the great deed of love.” Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–78), a famous poet who successfully transcended, in a few great poems, the journalist in him, who wrote topical jingles.
Line 23: ostayus’ s privideniem. Lexically: “I remain with specter,” a play on the closing cliché of ostayus s uvazheniem, “I remain with respect.” Every now and then fidelity receives a miraculous reward.
The poem's Line 8, ils furent des anges comme vous (they were angels, like you), makes one suspect that the spectral narrators in Transparent Things (including Mr. R., the writer who used to live in his house at Diablonnet) are the devils. In Line 80 of The Paris Poem VN mentions nevazhnye veshchi (insignificant things) up there:
А вверху - там неважные вещи.
Без конца. Без конца. Только муть.
Мертвый в омуте месяц мерещится.
Неужели я тоже? Забудь.
Смерть еще далека (послезавтра я
все продумаю), но иногда
сердцу хочется "автора, автора!".
В зале автора нет, господа.
In his poem Slava ("Fame," 1942) VN twice repeats the word veshchi (things, matters):
Есть вещи, вещи,
которые... даже... (Акакий Акакиевич
любил, если помните, "плевелы речи",
и он как Наречье, мой гость восковой),
и сердце просится, и сердце мечется,
и я не могу. А его разговор
так и катится острою осыпью под гору,
и картавое, кроткое слушать должно
и заслушиваться господина бодрого,
оттого что без слов и без славы оно.
There are matters, matters
which, so to speak, even… (Akakiy Akakievich
had a weakness, if you remember, for “weed words,”
and he’s like an Adverb, my waxy guest),
and my heart keeps pressing, my heart keeps tossing,
and I can’t any more while his speech
fairly tumbles on downhill, like sharp loose gravel,
and the burry-R’d meek heart must harken to him,
aye, harken entranced to the buoyant gentleman,
because it has got no words and no fame.
The author's mysterious waxlike visitor with soot in his red nostrils seems to be the devil. Plevely rechi ("weed words") for which Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin, the pathetic main character of Gogol's story Shinel' ("The Overcoat," 1842), had a weakness make one think of figura rechi (a figure of speech). At the beginning of Transparent Things the spectral narrators assert that the future is but a figure of speech, a specter of thought. But this clashes with the fact that Hugh Person (the novel's main character) dies in a hotel fire (chokes to death) in the summer of 1973, a year after the novel was completed and published.