Final Thoughts

This will be my last posting to this blog. I know that this last entry has fallen behind the deadline, but as this is simply a parting farewell to this class and the semester, I see no harm in it being a few days past the finish line.

I want to thank you all for making this class, yet again, such an exciting class to be a part of. Your interest in the works, your madness, your obsessions, drove everyone forward, and I greatly enjoyed sinking further into that madness. It was a joy to come to class every day, regardless of several comatose days of prolongued sleep-deprivation throughout the semester. =)

I want to thank Dr. Sexson for opening my eyes to the full scope of these masterpieces. Before joining the class, I had read Lolita on my own several years ago. I remembered loving the way it was written. And in the days before this class started, I would flip through the books, looking for that poetry. A line or a phrase would stand out. The entirety of the work stands out. It's poetry..... It is beautiful. Yet I believe these works are all the more beautiful now, because we know the framework. It is easy to look at a beautiful human being and see that beauty on the outside, but to find the foundation for that beauty within--to see the blood and bones of the making of that beauty is something else entirely. This is what Vladimir Nabokov offers to us--the ability to see a masterpiece as well as its making.

We keep searching in his works for an ultimate truth, for some final theory that will package Nabokov and his masterpieces into a nice, neat little box safely tucked away in our minds. This is the process we adopt with any major work. We pry and we lift up every floorboard until we can say, "this is the theme" or "this is what this means" or "this is what this work says about its creator". It's easier that way. It is harder to leave things complicated. But life itself is not simple. In life, we find no easy answers, only more and more questions. We stumble down false trails and into webs of our own making, becoming hopelessly entangled, but truth....the entirety of truth, we never attain. The search itself has meaning. Discovery, of even the smallest part of that truth, has value. We say that Nabokov's works have more "pleasure per square inch" than any other because he replicates this human condition. This is something of beauty and of pain. This is something divine and mundane. This is infinity in a moment, forever in a heartbeat. Nabokov is one master who will never be happy inside of a box. His works, like liquid light, will permeate every aspect of ourselves whether we want them to or not, and we, like his characters, will never be at rest. These are the eternities for which we live our lives. This is immortality.

I believe I will never be done with the works of Vladimir Nabokov. I will come back to his novels, time and again, like a great lemniscate, gaining no greater truths, perhaps, but swimming in the light of that immortality.

Thank you all, once again, for an amazing semester. I can't wait to see some familiar faces in Emergent Lit.

--Christina