VLADIMIR NABOKOV
343
world. Finally, the world of the local farmer differs from the two others
in that his world is intensely emotional and personal since he has been
born and bred there, and knows every trail and individual tree, and
every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm connection
with his everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small
things and patterns which the other two-the humdrum tourist and
the botanical taxonomist-simply cannot know in the given place at
the given time. Our farmer will not know the relation of the surround–
ing vegetation to a botanical conception of the world, and the botanist
will know nothing of any importance to him about that barn or that
old field or that old house under its cottonwoods, which are afloat, as it
were, in a medium of personal memories for one who was born there.
So here we have three different worlds-three men, ordinary men
who have different
realities-and,
of course, we could bring in a
number of other beings: a blind man with a dog, a hunter with a dog, a
dog with his man, a painter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl out of
gas--In every case it would be a world completely different from the
rest since the most objective words
tree, road, flower, sky, barn, thumb,
rain
have, in each, totally different subjective connotations. Indeed,
this subjective life is so strong that it makes an empty and broken shell
of the so-called objective existence. The only way back to objective
reality is the following one: we can take these several individual
worlds, mix them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that
mixture, and call it
objective reality.
We may taste in it a particle of
madness if a lunatic passed through that locality, or a particle of
complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at a lovely
field and imagining upon it a lovely factory producing buttons or
bombs; but on the whole these mad particles would be diluted in the
drop of objective reality that we hold up to the light in our test tube.
Moreover, this
objective reality
wi ll contain something that transcends
optical illusions and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of
lofty emotion, of energy and endeavor (and even here the button king
may find his rightful place), of pity, pride, passion-and the craving
for a thick steak at the recommended roadside eating place.
So when we say
reality,
we are really thinking of all this-in one
drop-an average sample of a mixture of a million individual realities.
And it is in this sense (of human reality) that I use the term
reality
when placing it against a backdrop, such as the worlds of "The
Carrick," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "The Metamorphosis,"
which are specific fantasies.
In "The Carrick" and in "The Metamorphosis" there is a central
