“As he read them, did he read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as one should do when reading poetry? […] if a collection opens with a poem about “A Lost Ball”, it must close with “The Found Ball’.” The Gift, Penguin ed, p.33

… “when working on his Texture of Time, Van found in that phenomenon additional proof of real time’s being connected with the interval between events, not with their ‘passage,’ not with their blending, not with their shading the gap wherein the pure and impenetrable texture of time transpires.” Ada,2, ch1.

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of Time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval. The regular throb itself merely brings back the miserable idea of measurement, but in between, something like true Time lurks […] We have suggested earlier that the dim intervals between the dark beats have the feel of the texture of Time. The same, more vaguely, applies to the impressions received from perceiving the gaps of unremembered or ‘neutral’ time between vivid events. I happen to remember in terms of color (grayish blue, purple, reddish gray) my three farewell lectures — public lectures — on Mr Bergson’s Time at a great university a few months ago. I recall less clearly, and indeed am able to suppress in my mind completely, the six-day intervals between blue and purple and between purple and gray […] that dim continuum cannot be as sensually groped for, tasted, harkened to, as Veen’s Hollow between rhythmic beats; but it shares with it one remarkable indicium: the immobility of perceptual Time. Synesthesia, to which I am inordinately prone, proves to be of great help in this type of task — a task now approaching its crucial stage, the flowering of the Present.” Ada,4.

While I was reading passages from “The Gift” ( in the past I underlined the ironical use of “honesty/dishonesty” in its first and third paragraphs*), I couldn’t help being surprised by the evolution of VN’s intuition related to the “chinks between words” (set in close association to an indication of Proust’s Recherche by the “Lost/Found” ball and the interval of life/Time in between), passing through the imaginary reunion of the lost/found fragments from a decorated faience vase in Speak,Memory which spanned various generations, and what the author later developed in Ada.  One’s search for those dispersed images and thoughts are also part of the same process, expanding the universe V.Nabokov was coping with in his search after past and present, clear or dim “registers” (unfortunately I cannot count with the help of synesthetic “terms of color” as is the case with Van Veen’s “gaps”…)   

British psychoanalyst W.R.Bion published an essay with the title “Caesura,” selecting the term in accordance to Freud’s employ of it in “Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety,” 1926: "There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life than the impressive caesura of the act of birth would have us believe". Not only did Bion intend to lay stress on the relationship between physical and psychological birth but also to the artificial interruptions in what he considered to be a continuous flow of verses, and most of all, of events that are falsely separated by the “caesura of time and space”, or of fragmentary emotional states and thoughts.  This same term, “caesura”, is applicable to some of the conjectures Van Veen expounded in Ada, ch.4 in relation to “intervals”, with the additional contribution of Henri Bergson’s philosophy about “Time” – although VV examined the gap itself, not the continuity that the existence of such a gap would keep away from consciousness. Bion, however, also considered the importance of these gaps by taking into account the invisible psychical exchanges between two people, and the particular “field” (pertaining to the dimension of “transference-countertransference” love and hate) operating in that interval. For Bion in a psychoanalytic session it is important that attention is directed to what occurs in this interval, not what occurs with the psychoanalyst or with his patient seen in isolation.  I think that one may extend this perceptual practice to understand what similes and analogies engender in speech and in literature. I mean, instead of placing together two pieces that have something in common to propose a simple addition or getting lost by the indicated similarities (and the aesthetic thrill they may provide), one may also focus the items which were left out from the visible similitudes in order to find something new that lurks in the overall relationship.  At least, this is how I feel that Nabokov’s “analogies” affect me: they don’t explain away the obvious: they indicate a discovery on the making.

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* “(a foreign critic once remarked that…it is only Russian authors who, in keeping with the honesty peculiar to our literature, omit the final digit).”

  “The van’s forehead bore a star-shaped ventilator. Running along its entire side was the name of the moving company in yard-high blue letters, each of which (including a square dot) was shaded laterally with black pain: a dishonest attempt to climb into the next dimension.”(11)  “she is morally transplanted to a special world where she grows intoxicated from the wine of honesty, from the sweetness if mutual favors, and replies to the salesman’s incarnadine smile with a smile of radiant rapture.” (13)