Nobody but nobody writes like Nabokov. Perhaps better known as the author of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir of his youth called Speak, Memory is a revisited self-translation of an older work called Conclusive Evidence. Self-translated? He originally wrote in French about his youth as a young Russian aristocrat. Then he re-worked some of the memories and language. In the first chapter, he comes ponders the meaning of time:
I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it — just as excited bathers share shining seawater — with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time’s common flow, an environment, quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive.
And then later, pondering the moment he became aware of the arrow of time, in the midst of a joke told by his father:
[The] first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.
Nabokov is the kind of writer who is best taken in very small, undisturbed doses. Don’t both with background music. You needn’t a cup of coffee, or a vista. Nor do you need fresh air. His is the world of all that stuff. You can scarcely read a single page of Nabokov and not feel the need to take a walk and soak it in before the next. It’ll take you a while to finish, but as he also writes, “In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.”
