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

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This "mental jerk" grants knowledge and understand-
ing quite different from the kind of knowledge the
senses can give and from intellectual knowledge.
The senses and the intellect are insufficient. They
cannot fulfil our desire to find out about the true
meaning of things. What the average mind perceives
through them is what Nabokov calls "average reality",
but, he says, "that is not true reality. "59 Even
science has not taken us through to that:
I don't believe
...
that any science today
has pierced any mystery... We shall never
know the origin of life, or the meaning
of life, or the nature of space and time,
or the nature of nature, or the nature of
thought.
o
As Christmas Humphreys says:
The intellect may argue and debate; it
may learn and teach a vast amount aý1ut
almost anything; it can never KNOW.
Nor can our senses and the intellect help us to
know an individual thing or person completely. They
can take us far in our discovery,
_but
something
that thing or person will remain unattainable. The
essence, the soul, whatever one chooses to call it,
escapes:
There is
... what may be called the
'Ultimately Real', the 'Thing-as-it-isin-itself'.
This may prove to be unknowable
in its completeness. We may have to
confess that we cannot hope to reach
more than an approximation.
62
To quote Humphreys once more:
A rose may be torn in pieces, and each
particle analysed in the laboratory;
no scientist
find therein the beauty
6ill
of the rose.
Nabokov says quite the same thing: a botanist may
in
know a lily better than an ordinary person, and a