Paper Commentary---Kyle's Blog

I haven't finished reading through all the wonderful papers on the blogs, so I can't say if my choice is necessarily "the best". What does that really mean, anyway? However, Kyle's paper, entitled The Barber's Son, really caught my eye.

As Dr. Sexson pointed out, the scene with the Kasbeam barber was one of Nabokov's personal favorites; he said it gave him a great deal of difficulty. However, I never fully realized the significance of that short passage. Kyle's paper was like a puzzle piece finally fitting in place. One passage that particularly struck me was when Kyle talked about the difference between, in his words, potentially existing and existing immortally. To be imagined, to live on in memory or in art, this is the truest lasting form of existence. Photos, paintings, great novels, these places offer us a "refuge", a last hiding place from ultimate oblivion. This is why photos are so significant! True, there lies in them a certain element of death or decay, the fleeting moment barely captured. But there is also, as Kyle's blog helped me to realize, a sense of immortality. Why else would we, the human race, be so fully obsessed with recording, in this manner, ever moment of our short and meaningful lives?