I’m rereading a book by Nabokov called Transparent Things and I say ‘rereading’ but I don’t think I’ve really read it before. You know how sometimes your eyes skim over the words on a page and even though you see and understand the words you fail to digest any of it? I do that too often, but doing so is egregious in the case of Nabokov – I’m reading carefully this time and I’m sure I’m still missing things. Here’s something not to miss:
[The hotel] “sported cherry-red shutters (not all of them shut) which by some mnemoptical trick he remembered as apple green.”
The phenomenon of non-reading, though, is appropriate to the theme of his book. He talks about how we often encounter people and things without giving any thought to their personhood or history or ontology. We use things and interact with people with a kind of primordial intentionality (to borrow a Heideggerian phrase) – for much of our lives we non-talk to people while non-doing various day-to-day tasks. I don’t know whether this is merely a trend or a fundamental truth about human nature, either way it is commonplace nowadays.
There is one way in which we do find ourselves ‘drifting’ into the history of various objects; for example, if you hear a song that reminds you of that time you were 14 and first discovering heavy metal or you see a swingset with no swings that reminds you that you once played in the backyard and it seemed expansive. These experiences happen, but for the most part we fail to recognize anything more than a person here or an object now if we even recognize them as people and objects at all (and not just daily obstacles or mundane reruns of life in general). Another gem:
[The phone rings.] “As he scrabbled up the receiver, he groped with the other hand for his reading glasses, without which, by some vagary of concomitant senses, he could not attend to the telephone properly.”
Sometimes we perceive things that lead us down memory lane, sometimes we are indifferent, but it is a third possibility that is interesting. Every now and then you gain a sudden awareness that the person you just met is more than just a prop in this particular scene in your life. You may realize that they have a past, a family, interests and desires, pet peeves, talents, bad habits, etc., and the incredible vastness of a single person’s personhood (if I can call it that, the whole of their being) can instill a bit of shock… at least until you regain the normal posture of non-procession through your life. Or, with regards to objects, you may notice the puzzling complexity of the simplest thing – I read the other day that wireless electricity is well on its way to market and soon after it will be as necessary as cell-phones, but as I was thinking about how wondrous a technological feat this would be, I realized that I don’t even know how a TV works. Beaming electricity to a TV seems rather mystical (how is that possible?) but how is it that plugging it into the wall makes it do what it does in the first place? Sure I can tell you a vague story about how the electric current runs through it and phosphorous lights up pixels on the screen… but honestly, I don’t know what that means (and it may be completely wrong). And even if I did, I can’t imagine how such a thing might be invented in the first place.
I call these ‘absurd moments’ – well, at least they fit into the category of absurd moments, duly named in the vein of Camus (so it’s a Camusian idea – is it ‘ca-moo-ian’ or ‘camu-sian’ like ‘cartesian’?). When we realize how strange we and the world really are, when you look in the mirror and notice for a second that the stranger looking back is you, when you hear yourself making the meaningless gestures we make every day to appear civil (”how are you?” {at least in Japan if they ask that, they mean it… if they don’t care to know how you really are, they talk about the weather instead… although that is equally banal in its own right, even if more sincere than the alternative}), then you are having an absurd moment.
Back to the point, in his book, Nabokov explores the history and ontology of seemingly random things that his characters encounter (like a pencil in an old desk drawer). This act is what he calls ‘translucing’, and it would make for an interesting endeavor if we all tried to transluce every now and then to keep ourselves from skimming over our lives and the lives of others a bit too carelessly.