I will quote the writer who has given me more pleasure – “aesthetic bliss” he called it – than any other and whose birthday we observed earlier this week: “One is always at home in one’s past.” That might serve as a gloss on his autobiography, Speak, Memory, in which he writes at the end of Chapter III:
“I see again
my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its
reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits,
gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summery
warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present.
The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps
against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change,
nobody will ever die.”
“One is
always at home in one’s past” is taken from an interview Nabokov gave The Observer in 1976, a year before his
death. But it also appears, with the identical wording, in Chapter V of Speak, Memory. Vyra was Nabokov’s family
estate, fifty miles south of St. Petersburg, soon to be seized and looted by
the Bolsheviks. We needn’t be Russian aristocrats to appreciate the poignance
of Nabokov’s memory. In the same interview, Nabokov is asked, “Does this
suggest you dislike facing the future or contemplating the present?” He
answers:
“What we
perceive as the present is the bright crest of an evergrowing past and what we
call the future is a looming abstraction ever coming into concrete appearance.
I love and revere the present. As to the past, my dealings with it are more
complex, ranging as they do from delicious gropings to blind angry fumblings.”
[The Nabokov interview is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019.)]