''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

- 191
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ticism as one possible way to truth and reality, and
that it would be strange if he had completely ignored
it. There are hints in the short passages from Sebas-
tians's novels that we get, and in V's interpretation
of these novels, that Sebastian was preoccupied with
some of the central ideas of mysticism.
if
... we open our eyes and see clearly,
it becomes obvious that there is no other
time than this instant, and that the past
and the future are abstractions without
any concrete reality.
Until this has become clear, it seems
that our life is all past and future, and
that the present is nothing more than the
infinitesimal hairline which divides them.
But through 'awakening to the instant'
...
one sees that this is the reverse of the
truth: it is rather the past and the future
which are the fleeting illusions,
and the present which is eternally real.
We discover that the linear succession of
time is a convention of our single-track
verbal thinking, of a consciousness which
interprets the world by grasping little
pieces of it, calling them things and
events. But every such grasp of the mind
excludes the rest of the world, so that
this type of consciousness can get an approximate
vision of the whole only through
a
54
series of grasps, one after another.
For Sebastian, too, time in the commonly accepted
sense does not exist. He calls time and space "riddles"
(167). Dates mean nothing to him. There is no element
of succession or progression in his concept of time:
"Time for Sebastian
... was always year 1" t62). Into
this year 1, a sort of eternal present, is gathered
everything that has been and that is to be:
...
the mystic feels himself to be in a
dimension where time is not, where "all
is always now. "" 55
Similarly with Sebastian:
He could perfectly well understand sensitive
and intelligent thinkers not being