My curiosity about Nabokov's opening lines in "Speak, Memory" helped me to find a great many sentences (ranging from Beckett and Pascal, to Nabokov's own in "Pale Fire" and "Ada") that deal with the same mysterious darknesses that envelop the line of our individual existence. A quote by Barbara Strauman* from the screenplay of "Lolita" offers a fascinating twist of it (at least in my eyes).

It when we find that, as an Author, Nabokov can "serve a triumphant life sentence between the covers of a book."

'If I had given as much of myself to the stage or the screen as I have to the kind of writing which serves a triumphant life sentence between the covers of a book", Nabokov writes, "I would have advocated and applied a system of total tyranny, directing the play or the picture myself, choosing settings and costumes, terrorizing the actors, mingling with them in the bit part of guest, or ghost, prompting them, and, in a word, pervading the entire show with the will and art of one individual." (LS ix-x).'