Pale Fire

What the hell is going on, I'm being hit by a massive amount of strange information ranging from the smallest details regarding the names of butterflies to the haunting brevity of almost being run over by your friend. I have never read a novel like this before: it is like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle without having the full 1000 pieces. One of such a laziness of mind as I have exhibited at times sometimes thinks to himself that it's better to let the unconscious do the sorting and just reread it later (ending up in more work for my lazy mind, but it doesn't know it yet!). The other part of me says filling in the blanks, not the search for a fundamental theme, is where the fun happens. This novel, the first I've read by Nabokov, reeks of Nabokov. Could this be because he's a Russian posing as American? Could it be that his masterfulness lies in his ability to recreate the scene like it's real? Or (most likely) is it that Nabokov's obsession with death can only be compared (in the scope and magnitude of its depth) to mine? I deeply identify with this man, and believe that his accounts of mental disorders such as hysteria and lunacy to be dead on. Part of the reason for this is simply the vastness of information he has appropriated from personal experience, and part of it is that he still understands what lies at the heart of it: a desire for greater power. Whether that be the will to dispose of a tyrannical leader or to immortalize your soul in poetry, I somehow feel that we humans can do so much that is outside the normal processes of our minds. The best way I know how to do this is to take away something which you desire deeply. But I digress. My point is that Nabokov has created a web of reality which is so vast yet so compact that it inspires me. I felt for a long time like a knowledge monger, endlessly consuming bits of knowledge without being able to put it into some compact form. That, I believe, is the missing piece of genius. We can easily get addicted to knowledge, and that scares me (even though I've seen it). Anyways, about the unknown, the afterlife, the key to this lies in its simplicity. When I compare my experiences to those of John Shade I realize not only that mystical experiences are often quite similar to one another, they are often very brief. This inspires me to realize that humans still have a long way to go, but that progress shouldn't necessarily take place from one advancement to another (the path of convenience) but it should take place in the way of Nietzschean reevaluation. This means that no longer does the iPhone evolve from the Blackberry but that the individual's desires are transformed to create a man dedicated to himself. Suddenly, everything that a man sees is in a new color. I will not go into how to do this now, but I will say that it feels as if there is so much unused potential in this world of the future. A place in which change takes place in one's mind long before it comes to be a reality. A bridge in which the only builder is the genius: Nabokov.