All is quiet...

[alexpgp]

I must've been tired as well as grouchy earlier "yesterday" before bedtime, as I slept pretty much solidly for 8 hours once my head hit the pillow (getting up to turn on the A/C at 4 pm was the major bump in the timeline). That made up for a couple of days of thin sleep periods in the 4-5 hour range.

I picked up a copy of Nabokov's Butterflies on the way home from work yesterday. Nabokov was the author who, for me, sparked an interest in serious literature outside the context of making grades in school. Strangely enough, I picked up his Speak, Memory on my own - before the start of the coursework - just so I could walk into class and not be a complete nincompoop about who this fellow was (I was, after all, the only geek in a class full of lit majors).

You see, in college, I was an engineering major, and though I made my proper prostrations before the gods of the humanities, they were made under pain of receiving bad grades for failing to do so. I was a techie; a geek. Virtually all my friends were geeks, too. Like most of them, I devoured technical texts like there was to be no tomorrow. Unlike most of them, I also loved to listen to classical music and to read non-technical literature. However, in terms of the written word, my tastes ran more to Spillane, Asimov, and Heinlein than to Jonathan Swift or Joseph Conrad. In my sophomore year, I gorged on Ayn Rand.

Yet when I read the first few lines of Nabokov's autobiography, something clicked. There was music in the prose. Check out the opening line:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

That line captivated me. Enchanted me. Bothered me.

Ultimately, I think it changed me.

I enjoyed the Nabokov course tremendously, due (I think) largely to the enthusiasm of the professor. Somewhere, I still have the term paper I wrote for that course, and interspersed on the pages of my analysis of Nabokov's Luzhin Defense are numerous comments by the prof, written in a bold hand using a most authoritative Mont Blanc Meisterstuck fountain pen. (The comments gave me almost as much satisfaction, BTW, as the "A" on the title page.)

Now, I just need to find some time and actually sit down and read this new acquisition.

Cheers...

Comments

[alyna.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean. I recall reading Pale Fire with more clarity than I can remember my first kiss.

Reading a book like that can change the way a person thinks as surely as The Theory of Relativity changed the way people thought about science. Nobody seems to get that excited about literature anymore, because they don't see it as scientific. Today, it's taught as something too vague and open-ended to merit much study. But...

"The proper METHOD of studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is, careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one 'slide' specimen with another." -Ezra Pound, 'The ABC of Reading'

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the Pound quote. (You ever read any of Hugh Kenner's stuff?)

While I can recall neither Pale Fire nor my first kiss with clarity, I did - once - sit down and note down the top ten books that changed me (about a year ago, if memory serves, in an LJ post). Most of them were non-fiction, though.

Cheers...