Time

“The cradle rocks above the abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

Nabokov is very interested in time and people’s relation to it. As we have been reading through the texts I have noticed that VN spends a lot of time illustrating peoples discontent for how time takes a toll on our lives and how different characters choose to use their recollection of events. When John Shade loses his daughter he is caught up in the measure of time and how it has imprisoned him and left him with only the recollections of a life once lived. Even Nabokov comes to the conclusion that he “was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.” In the case of John Shade though, he is so distraught over the loss of his daughter he begins to question time itself. “Does resurrection choose? What year? What day? Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?” So many questions without a definite answer. It seems the only weapon we have against time is our memory. Nearly everything written in Shade’s poem is in the past tense. He can only recall what his daughter was and what she meant to him. When something as tragic as death comes, it really pushes the sovereignty that time has over us. Shade begins to use his recollections vigorously, trying to keep the connection with what he has now lost. He also begins to ask the same questions about his wife.

“We have been married forty years. At least
Four thousand times your pillow has been creased
By our heads. Four hundred thousand times
The tall clock with the hoarse Westminster chimes
Has marked our common hour. How many more
Free calendars shall grace the kitchen door?"

My sister and I had been talking about the revelation of understanding one’s individuality just weeks prior to starting class for the semester. She said that she first realized that she was separate from everyone else while sitting in kindergarten class. It was the first time that she realized that her thoughts and understanding of the world were completely separate from the people that sat around her. She also realized that she was not one with our parents, but a separate entity all unto herself. VN relates this to the theory of recapitulation stating “the beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time.” These understanding of individuality, the continuum of time, and the importance of our memory really separates us from the rest of the creations on this planet, for as Nabokov says “the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.”