Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0013943, Tue, 7 Nov 2006 13:30:47 -0200

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Re: Help with otherworldly logic
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Carolyn Kunin wrote: "I just ran across the often quoted statement VN made regarding his belief in a transcendent reality: "I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."... It's the second "not" that throws me....

The engraver Escher once indicated that the reality he perceived could not be expressed in words and he used brush and bezel to draw what he saw.
Perhaps VN, like Escher, might have used words as a pen with which he could shape what he saw lying beyond verbal thought.

VN didn't trust words ( he was rather explicit about that in S.O, or S.M or in his lecture on Joyce or... in all three...no time to check) . Negation ( "not", double negation),paradox, contradiction and empty spaces are an integral part of his pattern. We cannot see what he saw, though. We must try and see through "voids" of our own.

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