In the summer I make hay while the sun shines, barely reading or writing, but always a tinge of guilt prods at me for leaving these muscles to atrophy.
In the fall, in the spring I read again, starting with Vladimir Nabokov. It has to be him because I am a thief, as he is, and before I can lift my own weight I must have another lift me for awhile. The proverbial Standing On The Shoulders of Giants.
I know that I am weak when I fall into the abyss of worldly waste, especially political props. Tyrants, despots, money managers, peddlers of fear and other unimaginative destroyers. Of course, these types fill the pages of history and literature, but it takes imagination to embellish them and make them into great literature, because, really, they are small and stunted.
And so, I have begun my autumn reading with a reread of Nabokov's Bend Sinister. I've barely made it across the bridge. I'm not sure I can make it to the end because it makes me cry and I despise the Toad. But I do so love Nabokov's generous embellishments of undeserving creatures, his gift.
And then, there is Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man, which all who love Nabokov should read. Especially, Chapter XIV "Worth the Consideration Of Those To Whom It May Prove Worth Considering."
The entirety of Chapter XIV is absolutely gorgeous and Nabokovian....but, how can this be? Nabokov was not even a glimmer in God's eye when Melville conceived this. Perhaps, Nabokov is Melvillian. Or perhaps, genius and creativity have a similar hue no matter the author.
Some quotes from Chapter XIV of The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville:
As the last chapter was begun with a reminder looking forwards, so the present must consist of one glancing backwards.
True, it must be urged that there is nothing a writer of fiction should more carefully see to, as there is nothing a sensible reader will more carefully look for, than that, in the depiction of any character, its consistency should be preserved. But this, though at first blush, seeming reasonable enough, may upon a closer view, prove not so much so. For how does it couple with another requirement--equally insisted upon, perhaps--that, while to all fiction is allowed some play of invention, yet, fiction based on fact should never be contradictory to it; and is it not a fact, that, in real life, a consistent character is a rara avis?
If reason be judge, no writer has produced such inconsistent characters as nature herself has. It must call for no small sagacity in a reader unerringly to discriminate in a novel between the inconsistencies of conception and those of life. As elsewhere, experience is the only guide here, but as no man can be coextensive with what is, it may be unwise in every case to rest upon it.
But let nature, to the perplexity of the naturalists, produce her duck-billed beavers as she may, lesser authors, some may hold, have no business to be perplexing readers with duck-billed characters.
But though there is a prejudice against inconsistent characters in books, yet the prejudice bears the other way, when what seemed at first their inconsistency, afterwards, by the skill of the writer, turns out to be their good keeping. The great masters excel in nothing so much as in this very particular. They challenge astonishment at the tangled web of some character, and then raise admiration still greater at their satisfactory unraveling of it; in this way throwing open, sometimes to the understanding of even school misses, the last complications of that spirit which is affirmed by its Creator to be fearfully and wonderfully made
Ah, I love it. Good literature always points the finger at me, poking and prodding, making me laugh and cry with pity. It makes me human again.
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