Seeing Trees and Magic Carpets: On Nabokov

Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.  My sun, my soul.  Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.”  

Those three sentences are, in my opinion, some of the best opening lines in twentieth century literature––alongside my personal favorite, Bradbury’s seductively concise “It was a pleasure to burn.”  The alliteration, the immediate bringing into light of the novel’s major themes, the metrical perfection.  After first reading them, I began typing hurriedly into the note on my phone titled “LOLITA,” one of the many megabytes of ephemeral cloud space dedicated to quotes I come across in life or literature that I find meaningful, beautiful, funny, or otherwise compelling.  

It was the winter of 2022, the time when 2022 was almost 2023 but not quite, when I brought my copy of Lolita on my college’s winter break.  It’s a tendency of mine to read whenever possible, so as my partner and his family watched football games in distant states where there was more snow than turf visible and where announcers discussed the dynamics of how cold affected the feel and trajectory of the ball, I plucked my “The Annotated Lolita” from my suitcase and brought it to the blanketed couch.

Although my text selection sometimes becomes a subject of inquiry, it is not often commented on.  However, with Lolita, I was met with groans and facial motions signifying disgust.  “Why would you read that?  Isn’t it about a pedophile?”  I tried to explain that it is a “misunderstood classic,” as this Medium writer puts it, for the reader is not meant to believe the claims of the rather tragic figure of Humbert Humbert, as this New York Times reviewer explains.  Moreover, the sheer playfulness and novelty of Nabokov’s words and worlds are more than worth finding oneself into the nympholept’s unreliable mind and narration.  The expressions in the eyes of my readers––and their laughter––as response to my attempted elucidations showed me that I was not getting through as I had wished. 

But I am not here today to discuss the merits of this novel.  That has been done and redone enough times that if a reader seeks interlocutors on either side of the discourse, she will find it….

There’s a well-known story about Nabokov’s time as a writing teacher––so well-known that it’s even mentioned on Cornell’s website. According to the story, a student (a person not unlike myself less than a year ago, attending a reputable college and doing well enough yet likely uncertain about what she wanted to do with her life; seeking role models and mentors to help her find a right path) attended one of Professor Nabokov’s office hours and asked him for advice on writing.  The balding man asked in return, “What kind of tree is that?” gesturing to the naked branches just outside his paned window.  

The student didn’t know.  

“Then you’ll never be a writer,” the professor replied, in all seriousness.

The power of observation, of retaining the input from sensory scrutiny, is an aspect of successful writing that Nabokov prized above all else.  Although all memoirs are rooted in invocations of memory–– the genre’s name indeed refers to it––Nabokov’s Speak, Memory specially emphasizes the power and importance of his remembering faculty.  And remembering is merely a retrospective observation.  

For me, as I discuss in our previous newsletter, the act of remembering is dreadfully tinged with the possibility of unconscious, unintended revision.  The result of this revision is that although there is a fact of the matter about the events that took place, those facts may be inaccessible.  But in Speak, Memory, Nabokov confesses that he “does not believe in time.”  He is not trying to give an objective account of the past.  Rather, he writes: “I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.”

While his visitors trip, Nabokov writes:

The highest enjoyment of timelessness―in a landscape selected at random―is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. 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―to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

In other words, Nabokov’s favorite retrospective observations are about moments of intense observation in his life––him and his butterflies.  

Aristotle says that philosophy is founded in wonder.  I would say that wonder arises from observation, from questioning the make up of, or reason for, the nature of what is under one’s observation.  So, Nabokov’s seemingly impudent phenological question points to a deep connection between the strong philosophical and literary minds: their connectedness to, and consequent curiosity about, the world around them.  

His Magic-Carpet theory points to something else entirely, something with wholly more existential intrigue.  By comparing the experience of memory––an observation about the self and its experiences rooted in time––to a magic carpet, Nabokov rejects objectivity as a property of time.  What matters about what he remembers is not the actual thing that happened but the role it plays in the pattern of his self, how he understands what forms him.  Time is not important in and of itself, it is only the framing device, Nabokov seems to say.  He echoes Einstein’s understanding of time: “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”  

Although Nabokov’s Magic-Carpet view may seem at odds with how people generally experience time––sequential and ceaseless––it makes one wonder whether all events, once they become memories, necessarily exist only in one’s mind, or a collection of minds?  And are they therefore always, in fact, happening/existing all at once in the stalls that populate the conscious and the unconscious?  

Maybe that’s why Nabokov wrote fiction.  Fiction is like his magic carpet of memory in that it occurs both on its own time––”a book is always happening in its own right,” I would tell my writing center students, “that’s why we use the present tense in literary analysis”––and within the ordered sequence that humans experience as time in its physical book form.  

Books––or very good books, in any case––can hold the same magic for a reader as memory holds for Nabokov.  He wrote that “one is always at home in one’s past.”  To be ‘at home,’ is to feel completely comfortable, swaddled by familiarity and warmed by the freedom granted within one’s own domain.  This at-homeness also brings along that sense of timelessness he describes so well. 

Beginning in the industrial age, we have imposed on ourselves a pervasive awareness of precise time.  Nowadays we have ticking clocks on as many digital faces as possible, and reminders to keep us in place, and digital calendars in our pockets, and we move through time deeply aware, and perhaps slightly mournful, of its passing because by the time we check the clock for the 20th time that day, it’s almost already time to go to bed and set an alarm to wake up and do it all over again.  

In one way, I interpret this obsession with time as ego-driven.  Death is the ultimate timelessness, and the more we keep ourselves aware of the minutes that pass, the further away we are from the formless unknown.  There are other things that belong to timelessness, however.  Sex, for one.  Ecstasy.  God.  Oneness with nature.  Music.  

In Joan Didion’s White Album, she writes about an evening she spent “sitting on the cold vinyl floor of a sound studio on Sunset Boulevard watching The Doors record a rhythm track.”  Her journalistic intrigue with the band lay in the fact that “The Doors seemed unconvinced that love was brotherhood and the Kama Sutra,” unlike other sixties rock-and-roll bands.  Uniquely, “The Doors’ music insisted that love was sex and sex was death and therein lay salvation.”

The undercurrent connecting those experiences is the modality of timelessness, the existence beyond the confines of quotidian rhythms.  Time is a construct.  It is our most ubiquitous, and thereby our most oppressive, construct.  By the same token, timelessness becomes precious, ineffable, spiritual, otherworldly, because feeling it takes us away from the inevitable momentum that underwrites the experience of everyday life.  

Youth bears a sense of timelessness also.  Besides the circadian rhythm, concepts like lateness, on-timeness, or scheduling come only when someone becomes more gravely embedded into ‘Adult Life,’ or perhaps put more accurately, Institutionalized Time.  Because it starts, for most, with school.  

Putting aside the presupposed creepiness of Humbert Humbert’s sexual attraction to young girls, is that feeling of timelessness what he seeks in Lolita’s youth?  Could it be that Lolita is thereby another of Nabokov’s endeavors seeking the ecstasy that comes with the timelessness he describes so compellingly in Speak, Memory?  And, in fact, couldn’t the forbiddenness of Lolita’s subject matter contribute to Nabokov’s rebellion against a practical world always seeking to temporally constrict experience? 

“Let visitors trip,” Nabokov writes, of his magic carpet.  ‘Let them trip on my taboos, on my language, on my novels written in verse, on trees they cannot identify,’ he might add.

Perhaps it is only after tripping that we look up and truly see.