Nabokov in Utah

"No other book has shaped my youth—and much of my adulthood, for that matter—as much as Jack Kerouac's 'The Dharma Bums.' [...] In particular, I always remembered how Kerouac said that the performance of these three guys on Matterhorn Peak, Morley who stayed down at the lake, Kerouac who gave up just below the summit, and Gary Snyder who made it to the top, mirrored each man's personal Karma. This made me think that perhaps I could find out about my own Karma by trying the same thing. So really, this hike was all about Finding My Own Personal Karma. Wow, that ought to be fun."

And although I'm being sort of facetious about the Karma thing here, I kind of did find my own personal Karma there, as I explain on the last page of my trip account.

In the case of Nabokov and Lone Peak, it was part coincidence that I was house sitting in Sandy, UT at the time, with a perfect view of Lone Peak from the hot tub in the back yard. So I had to climb the darn thing anyway; it left me no choice. Then I met a girl at Sugar House Coffee in Salt Lake who knew much more about Vladimir Nabokov and his stay in Utah than I ever will. It became sort of an obsession for us to retrace Nabokov's steps, do what he did, see what he saw, savor the feeling to sit on that breathtakingly lofty rock in the sky where he sat.

So I guess the answer to your question is, I see an artist's work, be it a writer, musician, painter, what have you, as an act of sharing with the rest of us. By conversely sharing an experience like a mountain climb with them, be in the same place as they once were, I mean literally, your butt being where their butt was, perhaps we can intensify that feeling of sharing. That may be an illusion, but it's a pretty darn good illusion, especially if you share it with another person.