'Death Is Divestment, Death Is Communion'

“Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew.” 

I seldom meet the dead in dreams, or the living. My nocturnal mind reanimates places I knew sixty years ago and last week but not their inhabitants. My dreams are largely unpeopled. I have no idea what this means nor what dreams in general mean. I accept them as free-of-charge entertainment, cartoons. Some are amusing, most are banal -- and forgotten. Now that Freud has been discredited, we can give up the search for symbols and Greek myths. I meet my dead only in memory. Vladimir Nabokov continues in the closing lines of Chapter 2 in Speak, Memory (1967):

 

“They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then -- not in dreams -- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.”  

 

My dead visit unexpectedly, in the middle of some mundane act, while reading or preparing dinner. I learned of Nabokov’s death on a warm summer night in Youngstown, Ohio, forty-seven years ago. I was a passenger in a car and heard the news report on the radio. The following day I began rereading Ada (1969). I had been reading his books for almost a decade, the new ones as they appeared and the older ones in translation. He is one of two or three writers at work during my lifetime whom I have read in toto and whose works, major and minor, I periodically reread. Few writers from any age, in any genre, have given me as much pleasure as Nabokov. He called it “aesthetic bliss.” In Pnin (1957), the deceptive narrator tells us:

 

“I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelopes us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”  

 

In his final, rather disappointing novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974), Nabokov’s hero writes “Death is silly, death is degrading” -- a rhythmic and thematic echo of “Death is divestment, death is communion.” And in Pale Fire, his greatest novel, he suggests that death may be less a conclusion than a transition.

 

Asked “What does death mean to you?” by an interviewer in 1974, Nabokov replied: “Nothing.” Nabokov died on July 2, 1977 at age seventy-eight.