Endless Discoveries

I will be honest with the reader of this post and state frankly that I had a great deal of trouble engaging with Speak, Memory throughout much of the book. Beyond the first few brilliant words, that remain burned in my sight like the flare of a candle all too quickly put out, my eyes flitted about the page like the varied butterflies Nabokov spent his life chasing. I became lost in the myriad of details, and by allowing my fullest attention to encompass only the smallest details, I lost sight of greater themes. I failed to discover that "marvelously disguised insect or bird" in "a tangle of twigs and leaves" (298).

Something changed, however, when my eyes reached chapter nine or so. Somehow, a brilliant metamorphosis took place by which I was transformed into an avid believer in the greater meaning of each seemingly unimportant detail. Like tumblers in a lock, motifs followed one after another until the very last lines when the key was complete. Suddenly.....an !explosion! of knowledge, discovery, consciousness. The last page of my book is littered with hastily scrawled notes, as I strove to hold on to each of the many frenzied thoughts all vying for my immediate attention. I wanted to read the book again, this time with all the care of a scientist, in order to.....divine... how the trick was achieved.

There is so much to speak of that I hardly know where to begin as it all wants to flow tumbling out of me with no order, no limitations, only connections. I hope, in the next few blog entries to delve into each train of thought, though they fall one into the other without end....

One recurring theme or imagery that struck me from the beginning was evident in the opening lines of the work itself:

"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness" (19).

From the very first line, Nabokov presents our lives as this vision of pure light suspended in impenetrable darkness. I was determined to track this light throughout every image, every snapshot in the album. Countless times, he describes a particular light striking an object, or a face, a tree.....a butterfly. This light then pervades every memory as some sort of divine thread connecting each piece of a fragmented whole. In his fascination with chess, again, there lies this eternal conflict between these two opposing forces of light and dark, white and black, life and death.

On Page 22, Nabokov speaks of his "birth of sentient life" in his first realization (or DISCOVERY) that he had a consciousness, an identity, independent from that of his parents. This realization gives him an intense form of joy similar to the solving of a puzzle, the winning of a chess game, the capture of an elusive species of butterfly. He speaks of childhood games and of the "fantastic pleasure of creeping through that pitch-dark tunnel" into the light (23). This scene, this remembrance, seems wholly metaphorical and echoes, again, that feeling of rebirth, of waking consciousness, and of discovery. Nabokov wishes to retain this waking, knowledgable state at all times, lamenting in later chapters the need for sleep. He says, "the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me" (109). He regrets the inevitable joining of oneself with the darkness. Every discovery along the way becomes a repetition of the act of awakening. And so we climb, ever higher, gaining increasing insight with every revelation.

So, the butterflies, those beings of riotous color and limited time become symbols of this act, and perhaps, of ourselves. We undergo immense metamorphoses throughout the course of our lives. These lives are limited by the boundaries of time, by those two great abysses that lie on either side of this existence, as Nabokov describes. We can only hope to live that brief life in glorious color. Perhaps the endless quest to capture these butterflies is but a quest to capture self, a quest to capture the sublime in every moment. So, like the intrepid butterfly hunter Nabokov himself represents, we set off, net in hand in search of "the blissful shock, the enchantment and glee" that can only be found in such discovery.