Nabokov's and Shade's experiences with time-space fantasies are
quite different.After Shade fell ill during his childhood, " wonder"
and "shame" were the sequel of one of his delusional experiences (
Pale Fire, lines 148/156):
" I felt distributed through
space and time:/ One foot upon a mountaintop, one
hand/ Under the
pebbles of a panting strand,/ One ear in Italy, one eye in
Spain,[...] There were dull throbs in my Triassic;
green/ Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,/
[...] And all tomorrows in
my funnybone."
In Strong
Opinions (p.48,1964), interviewed about at what time would he
have chosen to live, VN answered that "when" and "where" must be considered
because he "would have to construct a mosaic of time and
space". His desires which include "a warm
climate, daily baths...the honey of ancient Persia, a complete microfilm
library", summed up, very positively, as:
"I
would like my head to be in the United States of the nineteen-sixties, but would
not mind distributing some of my other organs and limbs through various
centuries and countries."
Instead of finding himself
involuntarily scattered all over the world ( like Shade), VN projected his
demands onto a "constructed mosaic," very specifically choosing his time
and his space (America in the nineteen-sixties, for example).
Perhaps the only item
that would match both Shade's and VN's fancy flights over the stage of the
world would be their fear of "all tomorrows." (..."sans teeth,
sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything").
More objectively, despite
the mystery of winged parnassian memory, as an endpaper in his
revised edition of Speak, Memory (SO,pg 90), he
planned to include "a map of three country estates with
a winding river and a figure of the butterfly Parnassius mnemosyne for
a cartographic cherub..."