The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

They come and go, these and other people, opening and shutting doors, living as long asthe way they follow is lit, and are engulfed in turn by the waves of the dominant theme: a man is dying. He seems to move an arm or turn his head on what might be a pillow, and as he moves, this or that life we have just been watching, fades or changes. At moments, his personality grows conscious of itself, and then we feel that we are passing down some main artery of the book. 'Now, when it was too late, and Life's shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, when no one had laughed in the room; having missed trains, allusions, and opportunities; not having handed the penny he had in his pocket to that old street violinist playing to himself tremulously on a certain bleak day in a certain forgotten town.'

Sebastian Knight had always liked juggling with themes, making them clash or blending them cunningly, making them express that hidden meaning, which could only be expressed in a succession of waves, as the music of a Chinese buoy can be made to sound only by undulation. In The Doubtful Asphodel, his method has attained perfection. It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations.

There seems to be a method, too, in the author's way of expressing the physical process of dying: the steps leading into darkness; action being taken in turns by the brain, the flesh, the lungs. First the brain follows up a certain hierarchy of ideas – ideas about death: sham-clever thoughts scribbled in the margin of a borrowed book (the episode of the philosopher): 'Attraction of death: physical growth considered upside down as the lengthening of a suspended drop; at last falling into nothing.' Thoughts, poetical, religious: '…the swamp of rank materialism and the golden paradises of those whom Dean Park calls the optimystics….' 'But the dying man knew that these were not real ideas; that only one half of the notion of death can be said really to exist: this side of the question – the wrench, the parting, the quay of life gently moving away aflutter with handkerchiefs: ah I he was already on the other side, if he could see the beach receding; no, not quite – if he was still thinking.' (Thus, one who has come to see a friend away may stay on deck too late, but still not become a traveller.