Reading Nabokov on the 66

After sweating under the unsparing New England summer sun, it's always a relief when the 66 finally turns the corner, cuts through a heat shimmer, and lurches to an awkward halt in front of the crowded bus stop.  I file in with the rest of the crowd, smiling when I see my second-favorite driver, the one with the shaved head and enormous Austro-Hungarian imperial mustache, and take a seat on the cold molded plastic.  Then, before any chatty Mormon missionary can corner me in my vulnerable window seat position, I quickly pull out my trusty Imposing Foreign-Language Novel, which, even more effectively than some spindly iPod headgear, definitely plugs me out of the world.

Descriptive opening paragraph, imperfective aspect.  Now, to the particulars.

A heavy body dropped down on the seat next to me and dug something out of a canvas messenger bag.  I continued to stare straight into the middle crease of the book in my lap, Nabokov's The Gift, but in the gray sidebar of my vision I caught sight of my young, dark-haired neighbor and his reading material of choice: a double-spaced manuscript, computer-printed, with the title "The Voyage" puffed up in bold on the front page.  With a world-weary sigh, my neighbor uncapped a black fountain pen and began marking.  An indomitable smirk nipped at the corners of my lips as I envisioned the scenario from a third-person perspective: the self-important, stony look on the face of my neighbor as he read over his magnum opus, diligently adding descriptive adjectives in preparation for its judgment at the hands of a peer workshop, all while Nabokov spread himself out serenely in my lap and looked on with ironic, hawk-eyed glee.

Perfective aspect, which in English is simply the past tense.  Now, onto the essay.

I can't imagine I'm the only one.  For anyone who's ever maintained an inner monologue, taken a creative writing class, or secretly yearned even for ghostwriting and hackwork in the name of professionally stringing together sentences, reading Nabokov must be utterly insufferable.  Part of it is the endless stream of images so mind-numbingly vivid (the creaky old armoire with a door that sporadically swings open, like a second-rate provincial actor stepping onstage out of turn) that you love him for sharing them and hate him for rubbing in your face the fact that their intrepidness can no longer be yours.  If Nabokov had a Twitter feed, it would read like one of his novels parsed into 200 word segments, each as meticulous, symmetrical, and stunning as the most well-crafted 400-page backbreaker.  But even more painful is the logic, the brutal logic so brashly and coldheartedly laid bare: whatever it is, he has it.  The Gift.  And no matter how carefully you chart out your plot points, diagram your characters, and polish your manuscript, you'll always look like my dear neighbor and seat-mate, poring over "The Voyage" and dreaming of accolades.  Never, ever, ever, so don't even dream.

But.  Later, sprawled on my bed, with a chilled beer and a well-aimed fan working overtime to leech the day's heat out of my bones, I feel more optimistic.  And, for the first time, I savor the full meaning of the ancient anecdote handed down like scripture in my department, the one about when good old Roman Jakobson was head of Harvard Slavic and refused to hire Nabokov to teach literature because, loose quote, "we wouldn't hire an elephant to teach zoology."  Gone are the days of the elephants, I think, not without remorse.  But also gone are the days of the elephants in the room and their despotic zookeepers, to be replaced by myriad, twittering butterflies.  Less likely to knock anyone off their feet, I suppose, and certainly nine-tenths frivolousness wing-beating.  But no less likely to produce hair-raising shivers once in awhile with the right, light, innocent little touch.