TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

The Dreamed Part

for the attack of the plot and the story.

Vladimir Nabokov thinks the same thing as him or, better, Nabokov thought it first so that, later, when he read it, he could think, so excited and pleased: “Hey, but if I think the same thing as Nabokov . . .” † Vladimir Nabokov / Interview: “Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average ‘reality’ perceived by the communal eye. [. . .] You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects—that machine, there (the recorder?), for instance. It’s a complete ghost to me—I don’t understand a thing about it and, well, it’s a mystery to me, as much of a mystery as it would be to Lord Byron (. . .). We speak of one thing as being like some other thing, when what we are really craving to do is to describe something that is like nothing on earth.” He read that in the night, with a little blanket around his shoulders, at a time when he still didn’t dare consider himself an insomniac, but someone who “worked better when everyone else is asleep.” And he looked at his computer and his computer looked back with a circular and red and HAL 9000 screensaver and transported part of the best day into part of the best book and “Do you read me, HAL?”

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