Cosmic Sychronization

"In a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better.… While the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur—all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus." (pg. 218)

Nabokov likes to produce the notion that instances are all connected within a point in time. This really helps to understand some situations in Nabokov's novels where many things take place simultaneously. In Pale Fire, the whole poem deals with moments in time that overlap and then move to the past and reoccur again. It is alluded to in the novel that Jack Grey is plotting his plan throughout the commentary. Nabokov coined the term "cosmic synchronization" in his biography Speak, Memory which was defined as the "capacity of thinking several things at a time". I think this has to go along with the reader as well when reading any of Nabokov's works. When Hazel Shade is dying in the poem, that is the only thing that isn't discussed.

"You gently yawned and stacked away your plate.
We heard the wind. We heard it rush and throw
Twigs at the windowpane. Phone ringing? No.
I helped you with the dishes. The tall clock
Kept on demolishing young root, old rock." (478-82)

Even though the most crucial part of the storyline is Hazel dying, life still goes on regularly adjacent to the incident. Even thought this is a simple literary tool, I think the reader often neglects issues that go on around the main plot of the story which would make Nabokov a hard read for a lot of people.