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Comment by brooklyn_ashey | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing this. I'll never forget reading Speak Memory. (!) The opening sentences or somewhere near the opening ones concerned Nabokov's meditation on death and birth and how alike they are. He talked about how strange it is that before we are born, we aren't missed because we aren't yet there. He goes into the feeling of thinking about this in a dreamlike manner and there are several dreamy passages throughout the book. I agree it was his best one. Thinking about him reading a corny dream book and being taken in by it a bit humanizes him. Great article.

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"The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is headed for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged — the same house, the same people — and then realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse order of events, his very bones had disintegrated."

Yes! yes! It's been over twenty years since I read this and it still calls to me. Thank you for reminding me how beautiful and true that passage is. His rhythm in this part is like a swing. Dream-like. Another lovely spot in the book was when he called to a loved dog on a beach "Floss!". It was a great way to end a section by letting it slip into memory like shouted words on a beach fade after a loved dog, especially its name.

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