I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessnessin a landscape selected at randomis when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concernto the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

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About Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov was a 19th-century American and american novelist. Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was a Russian and American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife, Véra Nabokov. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Time — Reflections on the passage of time and how we spend it

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