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Vladimir Nabokov

The Beginning of Consciousness

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was born in Russia and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a professor at Cornell University and a regular contributor to popular magazines. Among his works written in English are The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941); Pnin (1957); Lolita (1958); Pale Fire (1962); two collections of short stories, Nabokov's Dozen (1958) and Nabok­ov's Quartet (1966); King, Queen, Knave (1968); Ada (1969); and an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1951). Nabokov describes the awakening of his consciousness as a series of "spaced flashes with intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold." His sense of self and his awareness that his parents were his parents came after he had learned numbers and speech.

      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 heading 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, with the smug, en­croach­ing air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones had disintegrated.

      Such fancies are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

      I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket na­ture. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of per­sonal glimmers in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is caused merely by the walls of time separating me and by bruised fists from the free world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily painted savage. I have journeyed back in thought—with thought hopelessly tapering off as I went—to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only to discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short of suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to pass for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I was conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian lady novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives, been slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little em­bryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.

      Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. In probing my childhood (which is the next best to probing one's eternity) I see the awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers and speech more or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the inner knowledge that I was I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established only later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in relation to mine. Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of that revelation, immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping patterns of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother's birthday, in late summer, in the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I received. All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation; the beginning of reflexive con­sciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time.

      Thus, when the newly disclosed, fresh and trim formula of my own age, four, was confronted with the parental formulas, thirty-three and twenty-seven, something happened to me. I was given a tremendously invigorating shock. As if subjected to a second baptism, on more divine lines than the Greek Catholic ducking undergone fifty months earlier by a howling, half-drowned half-Victor (my mother, through the half-closed door, behind which an old custom bade parents retreat, managed to correct the bungling archpresbyter, Father Konstantin Vetvenitski), I felt myself plunged abruptly into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure element of time. One shared it—just as excited bathers share shining seawater—with creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time's common flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not only man but apes and butterflies can perceive. At that instant, I be­came acutely aware that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding my left hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard white and gold, holding my right hand, was my father. Between them, as they evenly progressed, I strutted, and trotted, and strutted again, from sun fleck to sun fleck, along the middle of a path, which I easily identify today with an alley of ornamental oaklings in the park of our estate, Vyra, in the former Province of St. Petersburg, Russia. Indeed, from my present ridge or remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as celebrating, on that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life. If my left-hand-holder and my right-hand-holder had both been present before in my vague infant world, they had been so under the mask of a tender incognito; but now my father's attire, the resplen­dent uniform of the Horse Guards, with that smooth golden swell of cuirass burning upon his chest and back, came out like the sun, and for several years afterward I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and kept myself informed about it, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order to check a new watch.

      My father, let it be noted, had served his term of military training long before I was born, so I suppose he had that day put on the trappings of his old regiment as a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete consciousness—which again has recapitulatory implica­tions, since the first creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creatures to smile.

Suggestions for Discussion

1.   How does the author convey the tone of the panic that can be aroused by contemplating the "prenatal abyss"?

2.   By specific reference to the text, explain the author's statement that "first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note."

3.   In your own words, explain the phrase "a brief crack of light between two eternities of dark­ness." What overtones of experience and myths are there in the image?

4.   At the end of the fourth paragraph Nabokov writes, "the beginning of reflexive con­sciousness in the brain of our remotest ancestor must surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time." Is this conclusion trustworthy and why?

Suggestions for Writing

1.   Recall an incident in your own childhood that marked a dramatic change in your concept of yourself or your parents, or your concept of the passage of time.

2.   Discuss the paradox in relation to its context: "In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much."