Speak, Memory: The Elation and Participation of Observation

          In the last half of chapter seven, Nabokov describes his memories of his trips to and from Paris from Russia on the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens:

          "It was at night, however, that the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens lived up to the magic of its name. From my bed under my brother's bunk (Was he asleep? Was he there at all?), in the semidarkness of our compartment, I watched things, and parts of things, and shadows, and sections of shadows cautiously moving about and getting nowhere. The woodwork gently creaked and crackled. Near the door that led to the toilet, a dim garment on a peg and, higher up, the tassel of a blue, bivalved nightlight swung rhythmically. It was hard to correlate those halting approaches, that hooded stealth, with the headlong rush of the outside night, which I knew was rushing by, spark-streaked, illegible." (SM 144-145)

          This passage (along with various others) points to Nabokov's aesthete like nature, and a firsthand account of his incessant, childlike fascination in observation. For in his twilight watchings, Nabokov not only sees things, but parts of things. Not only shadows, but, individual sections of shadows that pedantically peruse the inner area of the train car. In this we see that even from his early youth, Nabokov began to see life in fragmented amalgamation of realities, and, beyond even that, his burgeoning difficulty with duplicitous nature of things; outside vs. inside, dually projected by rhythmically swaying "bivalved nightlight."