'This Is My Time and Theme'

“I delight sensually in Time, in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum.” 

You may recognize the almost overripe prose. Ingesting so rich a diet too early in life can spoil one for plainer fare. It’s a sentence I underlined on Page 537 in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, the Nabokov novel I bought ($8.95) shortly after its publication on May 5, 1969. It’s a book I love almost as much for the memory of my teenage infatuation as for its teasing, alliterative, game-playing, occasionally self-indulgent density.

 

Further down the same page, beside Nabokov’s mention of “Aurelius Augustinus,” I helpfully wrote “St. Augustine.” At the bottom and continuing onto the next page I underlined this passage: “Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.”

 

I can’t say with certainty but Nabokov’s concern with Time probably influenced my own preoccupation with Time’s passage and efforts to recover the past. Within a few years I would read one of Nabokov’s rare, acknowledged masters, Marcel Proust, and that reinforced my devotion to memory. Scattered throughout my fifty-six-year-old copy of Ada are other underlinings and annotations that impressed my younger self, including this on Page 539:

 

“Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content, context, and running commentary—this is my time and theme. All the rest is numerical symbol or some aspect of Space. The texture of Space is not that of Time, and the piebald four-dimensional sport bred by relativists is a quadruped with one leg replaced by the ghost of a leg. My time is also Motionless Time (we shall presently dispose of ‘flowing’ time, water-clock time, water-closet time).”