A Memory From Another Time

The memory that keep returning to me as I try to think of one that happened earlier is of the trip my Mother and I took for my 7th birthday. You should know to begin though that I love traveling by train. It is the only way to travel and perhaps that is what makes this memory so memorable.

At this point in the story you should know that my Mother and I were stilling living in Seattle, and so we actually had a train station. For my 7th birthday my Mother planned a two week trip by train from Seattle to Los Angeles to visit my grandparents and go to Disneyland. What is interesting about this memory is that I remember very little of our adventures in Disneyland, which you would think would be a major event in a child's life. All I remember is being freaked out by how big Mickey was and crying and then riding Pirates of the Caribbean until the day was over. What does return to me every so often is that train ride and one night in particular.

If you have ever traveled by train you know that the quarters are very small. They try to jam a bunk bed and a small bathroom into a space the size of our full bathroom at home. When I was little though I loved being in cramped areas. That snug feeling as you read a book or colour, which is pretty much what I spent the trip doing. I loved making the trips to the dining car each evening for dinner and going to get more treats from the overflowing and enigmatic cart that was always there between meals, but was gone when we went to eat. I loved every aspect of the train. The slow pace, the sounds at night as you slept, the voices that would pass the cabin door and whispered conversations between the bunks as my Mother and I spoke in the middle of the night. To this day it is my favorite mode of transportation.

But the memory that is most prevalent is from one particular night. I of course was on the top bunk and on one side of me was the railing and on the other was a small, circular window. One night after awaking from a sound sleep I noticed that the train had stopped, and so I decided to check out the window. I pushed back the thin, soft curtains there and there seemed to be a kind of fog settling around the warm train from the chilled air that surrounded us. As the fog began to clear I saw several men standing there chatting, but something was strange. There clothes were like nothing I had ever seen in day to day life. They were dressed as if it were the early 20th century and perhaps in England. I was intrigued and all I could do was stare at the scene before me. The train began to move then and we passed them in the silence of the early morning, and I watched as they faded into the fag that had once surrounded the train. I lay back and slowing began to fall back into the haze of the sleep that I had left just moments ago, and dreamt about the scene that had been before me.

Every time I see a train this memory returns to me, and it is a pleasant thought about my travels. Whether it was a dream or not it is a memory all the same. While others may forget their dreams I hold onto them and they become memories that I can dwell on. I hope with all my heart it was not a dream, but either way I will remember it for all time. A memory from another time and perhaps in a separate realm I am continually trying to return to.

Nabokov's Memorable Tales

It's hard to think of, when asked, what my first memory was. When do we really begin to retain such information, and what makes something memorable? Making it stay in the corners of our minds or not for all our time in this realm. Nabokov seems to have a fascination with the idea of memories and their importance to what we consider out future. In Lolita he writes of a man that lost a childhood love, and the memories of that love are what drive him to his obsession. Transparent Things is the writing of a man that tries to connect to his past and memories by returning to the places that are familiar to him. And of course there is Nabokov's own autobiography, Speak, Memory, where he is remembering his own past to some how understand his present.

As Brian Boyd writes in the introduction, Speak, Memory is unlike any other autobiography we readers have encountered from great writers, "...more than these and any other biographies it fuses truth to detail with perfection of form, the exact with the evocative, and acute awareness of time with intimations of timelessness (ix)." But in the end that is what makes his autobiography so timeless, his ability to connect that present with the past through his writing. Connecting those memories to the world in which he lives at that moment!

As Nabokov writes in the first chapter of Transparent Things, each encounter we have with some object connects to a memory we have of that object and that objects own history. "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 (1)." He goes onto write in Chapter 3 about a pencil Hugh encounters and the "memories" attached to that object.

These are the details that make Nabokov's work timeless and memorable. His writing is about connecting our present place to a memory long forgotten. In Dr. Sexson's Classical Lit. class we discussed the idea and importance of cyclical time especially in classical works of literature. Boyd again writes that Nabokov tries to break free of the linear time. Time is more than just cause and effect to Nabokov. As discussed in Classical Lit. anything that was believed to be important if missed would return again. That is what he tries to capture in his writing, that memories are events that are returning to us because of their importance. There is something critical that we need to understand in deja vu. We are being reminded of what is critical in this moment that we experienced in the past and must remember.

So that is what I am waiting for before I can write about by first memory. I must first encounter an object that connects my present to the memories in the corners of my mind. Then I will write about what I remember! And then my past will be with me at that moment and then I will be able to write about the memory that has returned.

The Beauty of Pale Fire

Once again I could go on and on about the masterpiece that is Pale Fire, but these few quotes will suffice for now. I wish I could just copy the whole poem into this blog, but parts of it live on in my mind forever and that is where it will stay for now!

"I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fe."

"Windows, as well known, have been the solace of first-person literature throughout the ages."

"Solitude is the playfield of Satan."

"The evening is the time to praise the day"

"True art is above false honor."

"All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born."

"...until the red of the sunset had turned to the ashes of dusk..."

"...sometimes when the poet paced back and forth across his lawn, or sat down for a moment on the bench at the end of it, or paused under his favorite hickory tree, I could distinguish the expression of passionate interest, rapture and reverence, with which he followed the images wording themselves in his mind, and I knew that whatever my agnostic friend might say in denial, at that moment Our Lord was with him."

An Update Before the Fire Consumes

So I am just finishing the masterpiece that is Pale Fire. The 999-line poem that is the work of a masters of prose. I am now realizing that I will not be able to finish all the works for class before class begins, but that is okay. I will reread them as we go along.
I probably started this blog much to early, but I am thrilled that I get to take a class focused on my favorite author of all time. He is so lyrical and while verbose I love that about him. I love that he covers every detail of a scene, from the fly crossing someones skin in the stifling heat of a hotel room to the detials of the sounds surrounding a character. He writes with such feeling that you wonder what kind of man could write like this, what his life was like, but that will all be revealed in Speak, Memory.
The good thing about starting the blog so early is that now I have easy access to all these wonderful quotes when I begin to write. Writing about my love of his writing and the details that I missed the first time I read the work. Each time a read one of his works I discover something new!
That is the magic of Vladimir's works. Each and every time you open then up it is like visiting an old friend. Perhaps that is why I feel such a connection to his works. Or it is like Updike says, "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically."

Transparent Things of the Past

Finally the Internet is working at home. It seems to be a hit or miss most of the time. A while back though I finished Nabokov's Transparent Things. One word, MAGNIFICENT! Again I have so many quotes I just don't know where to begin! His writing is lyrical and as I have discovered much better when read aloud. His words seem to come alive when heard out in the open. I am sure people on the ferry to Bainbridge thought I was quite insane! So here they are more of Vladimir's magnificent prose!

"We recognize its presence in the log as we recognize the log in the tree and the tree in the forest and the forest in the world that Jack built. We recognize that presence by something that is perfectly clear to us but nameless, and as impossible to describe as a smile to somebody who has never seen smiling eyes."

"Of the two thrills young Hugh experienced, one was general, the other specific. The general sense of liberation came first, as a great breeze, ecstatic and clean, blowing away a lot of life's rot."

"On contact with paper it acquired a shapeliness, a richness, an ostensible dash, that caused some of the less demanding reviewers in his adopted country to call him a master stylist."

"'Made in Turkey,' whispered its label."

"Hugh, a sentimental simpleton, and somehow not a very good Person (good ones are above that, he was merely a rather dear one), was sorry that no music accompanied the scene, no Rumanian fiddler dipped heartward for two monogram-entangled sakes. There was not even a mechanical rendition of 'Fascination' (a waltz) by the cafe's loudplayer. Still there did exist a kind of supporting rhythm formed by the voices of foot passengers, the clink of crockery, the mountain wind in the venerable mass of the corner chestnut." (I love the way he writes about sounds. A quote in Lolita that is my favorite is later to come that perfectly exemplifies this!)

"...if they had not been especially close fitting she would have wiggled her toes inside as a woman does when her footwear happens to be discussed in flattering terms (smiling toes taking over the making of mouths)."

"He loved her in spite of her unlovableness."

"Actually the favors of death knowledge are infinitely more precious than those of love."

"...not merely because a dying man cannot write books but because that particular one would never express in one flash what can only be understood immediately."

"Days like this give sight a rest and allow other senses to function more freely. Earth and sky were drained of all color. It was either raining or pretending to rain or not raining at all, yet still appearing to rain in a sense that only certain Northern dialects can either express verbally or not express, but versionize, as it were, through the ghost of a sound produced by a drizzle in a haze of grateful rose shrubs."

There are many more where these came from, but I must save a few for later in the year. And perhaps that is the perfect place to stop after our several days of rain!

Dolores, Dolly, Lola, Lo and Lolita

So here it is some of my favorite lines from Nabokov's Lolita. You should know that I had a very hard time narrowing it down. If I hadn't quotes from this masterpiece would have filled this blog!

"She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita."

"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns."

"It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed."

"While a few pertinent points have to be marked, the general impression I desire to convey is of a side door crashing open in life's full flight, and a rush of roaring black time drowning with its whipping wind the cry of lone disaster."

"...I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else. She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past....I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still grey-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond....No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn-even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita."

"And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."

There is another really long quote that I love, but that will come later on in the evolution of this blog!

My Vladimir

This blog used to be for my classical literature class, but now it is dedicated to my favorite author, Vladimir Nabokov. A genius among Russian writers and a true artist of prose. From here on out I will be re-reading all the novels assigened for class and posting qoutes this summer before class starts in September. Now all can begin to understand my love affair with Vladimir and his writing that began at the age of 12. As Updike says, "Nabokov writes prose the only way it shoule be written, that is, ecstatically." Oh you are so right Mr. Updike!