In the beginning section of Nabokov's essay, there is a passage that so succinctly and masterfully describes the specific art in literature, that when I first read it I got goosebumps and almost felt child-like again. The passage reads:
"Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy cam crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature."
Here Nabokov points to the blurry boundary between story and reality, fact and fiction: the true art in literature. This can then be put to us humans as well. For is that not that true reason for meaning and connection between the self and others; that between the words people and characters say and the actions that they physically embody, do we not seek to find something more, something eternal? Nabokov would say, Yes. That it is natural.
"Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is the arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies and birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature's lead."
