Nabokov's "Glory"

[John Kasaian]

A novel I bought off the remainder table over 20 years ago still occupies a place in my book case. I was going through the book case to find items to put in our yard sale for tomorrow morning and I thought briefly of putting Glory in the box, but then I remembered why I had kept it all these years and more importantly why I liked it.

The novel is about a russian emegre (most Nabokov novels are of course---He wrote about the kinds of people He was familiar with) and one of the recurring themes involves a painting in the main character's nursery, hung where he could see it from his crib---it is a landscape, a trail dissppearing into a forest.

To my way of thinking it could have easily been a photograph but what the hey, I'm a lousy painter. So to continue---

References to the painting periodically pop up in the story and eventually the main character sneaks back into his homeland (and his destiny) from, I think Finland. He recognizes the trail he is taking as the same one in the painting in his nursery.

In Nabokov's autobiography He relates an early memory of seeing a model of either a ship or train in the window of a travel agency in a big city. The model is cut away, showing all the detailed little compartments where traveler's would have been staying.

I guess it is progress that everyone can book their own travel plans on the internet and travel agencies with elaborate window displays are thing of history---but I still remember those models, especially the cutaways.

These are owerful visual elements I think most people can identify with. What little boy hasn't been intrigued by model trains or little girl by her doll house? Indeed pictures we were exposed to in our youngest days also stimulate the imagination. Maybe even haunt us like the painting of a path through the forest. I think its a good thing (though I couldn't tell you why) but Im saddened to know my own children are deprived of such stimulation. Like much of society, my homes decor is barren by design. On the home design shows on cable t.v. art I notice gets a bad rap, like it is there more as a convenient gimmick to acquire ambience than something that can be a portal into the imagination.

What do you think?

I think I'm going to take more photos of trails disappearing into the forest ;-)

[Hugo Zhang]

Don't get me into Nabokov! I can never forget the sunset he fastidiously painted:

"I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the spare parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me."

If he were a photographer, he would use a LF camera, I told myself. But I could not figure out if he used a wide, normal or long lens to capture this sunset. I have seen hundreds of sunset, this one always stays.

[Marko]

John,

Funny that you mention that... There's a painting, rather large format, my father created when he was young that still hangs on his wall. I grew up looking at that painting, both going to sleep and waking up. It depicted a river flowing through the forest. When asked, my father said that that place did not actually exist, he just imagined it one day when he was 16 or so.

Yes, I see where you're coming from when you mention solid, lasting markers in one's life that provide both visual, tactile and even olfactory stimuli and a comfort zone at the same time. I can still remember how the furniture my grandparents had for their entire lives felt on touch and even the smell of the lacquer and the polish (always the same one). I can also vividly remember smell of the books in the local library where me and my friends used to spend many hours every week, throughout our childhood.

Those of us who grew up with such reference points will certainly see this new age as deficient, but to our children, it is a normal way of life. Having furniture for life is not just impractical, it is almost impossible. IKEA is much more convenient, and besides why would anybody get connected to furniture?

To put it in perspective, the generation of our kids has no idea what the phrase "broken record" means - they grew up with CDs. But they also grew up with computers the way we did with telephones and books.

What does worry me, though, is that so few people today, even our generation, value a good book or anything longer than couple of paragraphs. It used to be that books were prominently displayed in our homes, on nice bookshelves, valuable indicators of their owner's intellect and education. These days, there's rarely books in sight, there's usually no room left after the big screen TV and home theatre system were installed. And those hundreds of cable channels do nothing more than compete with each in getting bigger, more extreme, more ridiculous... This trend, I think, has to have a distinctly negative impact, not just on general literacy levels, but on any creative activity that requires a modicum of patience and focus, photography included.

Sometimes I wish I lived closer to my dad so I could occasionally go visit, sit down and just watch that painting while listening to some Liszt or Vivaldi. But wait, that's classical music... who in the world still listens to that?

[poco]

A good deal of the reason why visuals (or other stimulae) from childhood have such enormous staying power is because kids spend a long stretches of time waiting -- waiting for grown ups to stop talking, waiting for it to be late enough in the morning to make noise, waiting for meals to be made ready, etc... A great deal of time is spent with nothing to do but look at old familiar objects and find interest and life in them. Today, while there may be more occupations for small kids, I bet the same principle is pretty much alive. Their memories of early stimulation may be different, but will likely be every bit as vivid as our own.