In "Time and Ebb" (1945) Vladimir Nabokov reproduces the notes written by an optimistic ninety-year old scientist,  during the "floriferous days of convalescence after a severe illness."  Solitaire as a pastime became something "worthy of consideration, especially if one is sensitive to its mental counterpart; for is not the setting down of one's reminiscences a game of the same order, wherein events and emotions are dealt to oneself in leisurely retrospection."

The narrator states that he "can discern the features of every month in 1944 or 1945, but seasons are utterly blurred when I pick out 1997 or 2012." He hasn't described 2011, though, but it is safe to assume that we shall traverse it safely before landing in such interesting places as "the humid valley of planet Venus" teeming with "hesperozoa." 

The nineteenth century customs of his youth "were atavistically prone to endow the community with qualities and rights which they refused to the individual....More than other generations, they tended to overlook outstanding men, leaving to us the honor of discovering their classics (thus Richard Sinatra remained, while he lived, an anonymous "ranger" dreaming under a Telluride pine or reading his prodigious verse to the squirrels of San Isabel Forest...)...Elementary allobiotic phenomena led their so-called spiritualists to the silliest forms of transcendental surmise... Our denominations of time would have seemed to them "telephone" numbers. They played with electricity in various ways without having the slightest notion of what it really was - and no wonder the chance revelation of its true nature came as a most hideous surprise." The old scientist's father "taught music and was a composer himself" and he left Europe when his son was in his seventh year.while "indescribable tortures were being inflicted by a degenerate nation upon the race to which I belong."

The boy grew up in New York, and its parks were had trees with "their Latin binomials displayed upon their trunks...for we lived in the era of Identification and Tabulation; saw the personalities of men and things in terms of names and nicknames and did not believe in the existence of anything that was nameless," in the times of "quaint America of the Flying Forties" and "the soda jerk," when he "imbibed...humble mixtures...in an atmosphere of gloomy greed....Brass and glass surfaces, sterile reflections of electric lamps, the whirr and shimmer of a caged propeller...a dapper uniformed girl with a hypertrophied nether lip ... patterns and melodic figures, for the conscious analysis of which time is alone responsible, somehow connected the "drugstore" with a world where men tormented metals and where metals hit back."

The narrator's early fascination with "cinematographic pictures", trains and airplanes is lovingly described. A coach train's "haggard windows and dim lights...still lumber sometimes through my dreams...Dwarf dunce caps ...could flabbily cup (with the transmission of a diaphanous chill to the fingers) the grottolike water of an obedient little fountain which reared its head at one's touch." whereas porters announced "intermittent 'nextations' and checked the tickets of the travelers."
Later, in the seventies, he conjectures that, for those " who thus have seen nothing in the nature of flying things save perhaps a kite or a toy balloon (still permitted, I understand, in several states in spite of Dr. de Sutton's recent articles on the subject), it is not easy to imagine airplanes..." 
At that time, most boys could identify "planes from propeller spinner to rudder trim tab, and could distinguish the species...even by the pattern of exhaust flames in the darkness; thus vying in the recognition of characters with those mad nature-sleuths - the post-Linnean systematists...Attainment and science, retainment and art - the two couples keep to themselves, but when they do meet, nothing else in the world matters."

The story ends somewhat abruptly: "Admirable monsters, great flying machines, they have gone, they have vanished like that flock of swans which passed with a mighty swish of multitudinous wings one spring night above Knights Lake in Maine, from the unknown into the unknown: swans of a species never determined by science, never seen before, never seen since - and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk leading to an undiscoverable footnote."
....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

Long before Nabokov wrote "Lolita" or "Pale Fire" certain themes had been brought up by him as early as 1945: soda fountains and pouting girls (indicated, somewhat innocently, as an "hypertrophied nether lip...), inscribed trees (as in Wordsmith's avenue), mysterious telephonic time-measures, while electrictricity, by chance revelation, turns into a hideous surprise (Cf. ADA).

 

There's a Dr. Sutton (PF) and telescopes that reach hesperozoas in planet Venus [After all this planet is sometimes described both as a "morning star" and "a holder Abendstern" ("Vesper"), its size and brilliance as misleading as its stelar attributions would be -  and should the narrator's "regretted colleague, the late Professor Alexander lvanchenko" have aimed, in fact, towards astronomical items...].

 

There are silly spiritualist beliefs and post-Linnean systematists and then, when art and science meet "nothing else in the world matters." (almost all over Nabokovian novels, stories, interviews...) A flock of swans cross the sky, like Bede's sparrow through a lighted room, from "the unknown into the unknown." (SM, PF, aso)

 

Similar to Nabokov himself, more than thirty-years later, a forgotten genius read to "the squirrels of San Isabel Forest." 

 

The last line carried me, also, to Pale Fire's annotations:"human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece."(CK); Man’s life as commentary to abstruse/ Unfinished poem (... a message scribbled in the dark.) The lone star, "like an asterisk," might be a doubling back into an aging man's vision of ...Venus and to the power of reminiscing long lost innocent loves...