Alexey Sklyarenko: " Things and bridges are
part of Ada's metaphysics: "An individual's life
consisted of certain classified things: 'real things' which were unfrequent and
priceless, simply 'things' which formed the routine stuff of life; and 'ghost
things,' also called 'fogs,' such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments,
and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a 'tower,' or,
if they came in immediate succession, they made a 'bridge.' 'Real towers' and
'real bridges' were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one
experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened,
though."
Jansy Mello: Perhaps they are not
only part of Ada's metaphysics, but they may also reveal the author's
experiences with world and words
While going through Nabokov's sentences
to follow their variations in time and place, I became prejudiced
in favor of VN's vivacious tropes. This prejudice led me to suppose
that Ada's "bridges" and "towers," when they are rendered verbally, might
also be indicative of metonymy and metaphor, the pillars of
human remembrance and the "joys of life" (
but extraneous alusions, cross-references or recurrent themes, also
form bridges and towers.)
.
Wingstroke deals, almost exclusively, with
"fogs" (frustration, despair, death, foggy brain, foggy hallucinations). Inspite
of his denunciation of a ravaged homeland (lakes, woods, air, cities,
lores) the short-story The wood-sprite is not a "fog,"
though, since memory and its registers preserve its lushious
joy: "His voice literally blinded me. I felt
dazzled and dizzy—I remembered the happiness, the echoing, endless,
irreplaceable happiness.. [ ] his voice tintinnabulated, rustled—golden,
luscious-green, familiar" And then, there's pathos, "compassion and
beauty": "Silent are the orphaned bluebells that remain, by chance,
unmown [ ] "It was we, Rus', who were your inspiration, your
unfathomable beauty, your agelong enchantment! And we are all gone, gone, driven
into exile by a crazed surveyor." Or the ecstatic
synthesis in Sounds: :: " when I
withdrew deep into myself the whole world seemed like that—homogeneous,
congruent, bound by the laws of harmony. I myself, you, the carnations, at that
instant all became vertical chords on musical staves. I realized that everything
in the world was an interplay of identical particles comprising different kinds
of consonance: the trees, the water, you... [ ] it was not you alone
who were my lover but the entire earth. It was as if my soul had extended
countless sensitive feelers, and I lived within everything, perceiving
simultaneously [ ] ...I suddenly felt that, in place of
arms, I possessed inclined branches covered with little wet leaves and, instead
of legs, a thousand slender roots, twining into the earth, imbibing it. I wanted
to transfuse myself thus into all of nature
"
I hope you'll forgive me for
quoting only arbitrary chunks of Nabokov's stories. Fact is that, "literally," "the enchanter interests me more than the yarn-spinner or the
teacher"