I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use... This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern - Speak, Memory  

 

In this remarkably beautifully eloquent prose you can detect the same eloquent rhythms of the great, romantic nature poets (notably, Wordsworth, Shelley) and the Bible. And immortality is, of course, also what artists constantly seek, above all else, i.e., beauty itself (the aesthetic, the unitive, mystical experience).

 

Many of the problems and tensions generated in modern society are largely due to this lack of concern for this intangible, for this something beyond which is perhaps best personified by mother Nature. From Speak, Memory:

 

 

In fact, what is direly needed in plastic, contemporary technological society is to return to the soil, to nature, to a more organic earthy existence for our edification, our bildungsroman, our apprenticeship to life...

 

Though Nabokov staunchly insists that his flight into aesthetics has no social or moralistic intent, art is, nontheless, a highly productive and uplifting way of liberating the human spirit. Isn't creativity but a means of breakng our chains? towards becoming truly enlightened and free men by overcoming the limitations imposed by our insularly circumscribed, oppressive existence!...

 

And, today, more than ever before, we should - and must - have fruitful communion with the depths of Being, with our nature, in order to expand and recreate our consciousness. So that this new awakening - this growing, changing awareness, this ongoing cosmic consciousness-expansion trip into inner-space, will help us resurrect and reconstruct our lives, our defunct carcasses, in a unity of experience, of knowledge, not simply rationally and fragmentally but totally...

 

Nabokov's "cosmic synchronizations", his unitive consciousness trips, accounts for his exquisitely chiseled Chekhovian-like vignettes on time of such great originality, emanating from his unique and rich experiential, aristocratic heritage. His exotic perceptions of "reality" have extraordinary sophistication, high culture and versatility reflected and expressed in his work; and his short stories, in particular, testify to this beyond question. Is it any wonder that his tremendously expansive spirit, his imaginative or creative genius, encompasses all of "reality"? - Life in all its manifestations! -  "the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, the whole amplitude of time, which is eternity." (Whitehead's concept of reverence in education) - Signified by a spiraling image rising, rising - a "spiritualized circle" - uncoiled, set free, illumined...

 

- (Ibid.)

 

His art records a process of becoming - the evolution of the artist's self througfh artistic creation. Significantly, a butterfly or moth appears at the end of his stories or novels when the artistic "cycle" is complete and consciousness has hopefully been expanded or created. Ironically, his protagonists are weak, effete, completely antithetical to Nabokov - they simply cannot live outside their own heads or imaginations. It's as if they were severe schizoid personalities becoming more and more detached from reality till insanity cuts them off totally, i.e., to the point where they are no longer objective, wallowing beyond redemption in their egomania, their solipsism. Interestingly, too, this deteriorating subjectivity (narcissism, greed, rationalism, nationalism) are the very traits the highly intuitive and gifted artist, scientist, or mystic must overcome before s/he can be enabled to enter into the soul of the object and the nous of the world with complete sympathetic understanding. In creativity (philosophy of ""Suchness", Emptiness, Self-identity) there is no differentiation between subject and object.

 

But extreme unbalance of thes poles, however, produces either an automoton or a madman - both are human monstrosities in that they have forfeited their growth, their humanity, their optimum development... Can these characters, thus, be parodying, goading sick, stunted man devoid of harmony and unity toward greater maturity and "full-humaness"?

 

As a scientist and artist the author personalizes and makes unreal his characters to the extent that he attempts for purpose of analysis to understand them and himself better. For instance, the characters are both obsessed, mad - their minds are warped and they mirror, reflect very distorted pictures of the world. In the same way all of us, too, see and think in fragments - we perceive trees, people but not the forest, the whole, the total picture of reality, of man, the cosmos, the expanding universe as a world-within-a-world ad infinitum...

 

And this poignant, terrifying isolation results, particularly, because of our limitations in thought, in feeling, in other words, all of Nabokov's novels are, in essence, ironic anti-Platonic propositions, i.e., are 'exiles' terribly alienated, incomplete, desperately seeking out a higher unity, a greater integration within themselves and the world. Though there is a character whose intellect and genius catches glimpses of the Sun, he is dissociated  from the world of people and objects; and finally losing control of chess he's put on the defensive fleeing from both Sun and shadows, from Life itself.