''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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192 -
able to sleep because of an earthquake
in China; but being what he was, he could
not understand why these same people did
not feel exactly the same spasm of rebellious
grief when thinking of some similar
calamity that had happened as many years
ago as there were miles to China (62).
He cannot understand them because that calamity
is for him just as much of the present as an earth-
quake happening in China today.
His thinking is not of the single-track kind.
His mind and perception are awake at all times, not
only to individual sections of his surroundings,
excluding all the rest, but to the whole variety
of
things:
Most people live through the day with this
or that part of their mind in a happy state
of somnolence: but in
...
my case all the
shutters and lids and doors of the mind
would be open at once at all times of the
day. Most brains have their Sundays, mine
was even refused a half-holiday (63-64;
from Lost Property).
He often feels "as if I were sitting among blind
men and madmen" when he realizes how little aware
others are even of their immediate surroundings,
even of their fellow men (102). He misses nothing:
The blind man's dog near Harrods or a pavement-artist's
coloured chalks; brown leaves
in a New Forest ride or a tin bath hanging
outside on the black brick wall of a slum;
a picture in Punch or a purple passage in
Hamlet... (65; from Lost Property),
everything crowds into his mind at once, all the
time; things, too, that others might not think
worth noticing acquire beauty in his eyes:
... a sundazzled window suddenly piercing
the blue morning mist or beautiful
black
...
wires with suspended raindrops running
along them (65; from Lost Property).