On Enlightenment - Part IV

Meditation. Panic. Raindrops. Nabokov. A four-part series, 12/3/2024 - 12/6/2024.

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I’ve been reading Nabokov’s Speak, Memory intensely for the last few weeks, picking random sections, tracking closely, then more closely still, stepping through the garden of an extraordinary mind.

The writing is as dense as it is exceptional. I started the memoir six months ago like a little train that could, plowing through it page, page, page and driving myself to exhaustion until I finally quit and rolled backwards. I couldn’t gather enough steam. Then several weeks ago, I settled on a new, guilt-free approach. I decided to open the book at random and enjoy the writing wherever I landed, context be damned.

When there’s a word in the text I don’t know, which is more often than I’d like to admit, I let the text wait; I stop and look it up. I often read the same sentence multiple times, strip it apart comma by comma. I chase down images and back-references. It is an intellectual pleasure, but there’s real effort, too. My mind still wanders, but there is a freedom in not caring if I pass through Siberian chapters without getting out of my train, so to speak. I don’t care if I end up in Montreux, or a classroom at Cornell or a garden in Saint Petersburg. Call it slow reading. Call it meditation.

I don’t need to know what happened in Nabokov’s final year at Cambridge. And, honestly, I don’t care. I’m not sure he cared. He’s describing a garden from a balcony. The point isn’t to stroll every last path, checking off the labels on the roses, marking here and here and here. I’m completely freewheeling.

But slowly.

Zen and the Art of Nabokov.