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

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way one may wish and try to isolate and contemplate
one of the innumerable moments of life, which are so
elusive because "I myself am in a constant state of
trivial metamorphosis. " An "act of attention" helps
one achieve that:
[It gives us] three of four seconds of
what can be felt as nowness. This nowness
is the only reality we know; it follows
the colored nothingness of the no-longer
and precedes the absolute nothingness of
the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense,
we may say that conscious human life lasts
always only one moment, for at any moment
of deliberate attention to our own flow of
consciousness we cannot know if that moment
will be followed by another (549-550).
It is this nowness and reality that Van and Ada ex-
perience during and through their love-making, a re-
ality which, Van says "lasted a moment, but could be
repeated as often as he and she were physically able
to make love. "
It is very apt, too, that it should be moments of
love during which they have this experience. Surely,
at such moments, the mind is in an exceptional state
of concentration and, for a few seconds, remains in
that state. It is concentrated both on the immediate
individual present moment and on its experience, to
the exclusion of everything else, and the mind re-
maining unchanged, the moment, too, remains changeless.
With its sharpened awareness it is possible for the
mind to take the moment in completely. The green blur
of the poplars offers its every leaf, and the moment
of awareness offers its every detail and becomes real:
'But this', exclaimed Ada, 'is certain,
this is reality, this is pure fact
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this forest, this moss, your hand, the