Nabokov says, at the close of Chapter 8 of Speak, Memory, "I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth-sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park--not from the house--as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement."
This is the opening of one of my favorite passages in Nabokov's memoir -- where one particular memory, presented as a silent film, comes to life with the addition of sound, culminating in "the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers [who remain unseen], like a background of wild applause." I love the way the movement of the remembered faces (and later even their "mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech") shifts to the dappled patterning of light and shade (a favorite motif of Nabokov's) and, best of all, the mental tiptoeing of the narrator as he retraces, as quietly as possible, the steps that will lead him back.
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Susan Elizabeth Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L