Vladimir Nabokov famously despised Greek Philosopher Plato with all his abstractions and realm of ideas. As a man of letters, Nabokov delved into specifics with "the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."
My first acquaintance with Signs and Symbols happened thirty-five years ago when participating in my local Great Books group where the evening's discussion focused on the great author's very short story.
The tone of the discussion was somber, almost gloomy. This is a sad, sad story. I recall the group leader observing the mother and father are people that life has completely beaten down. As if to underscore this point, when the couple travel on a rainy day to the sanitarium where their only child, a son, is "incurably deranged in his mind," Nabokov has the New York subway lose its electric current between stations and the bus keeps them waiting and, when it does comes, it's crampacked with talkative high schoolers.
As we exchanged reflections on passage after passage, I was struck by the power of Nabokov's story, a story where I could detect only various shades of darkness and virtually no light.
Is this an accurate appraisal? Can anybody point to one instance where there is a ray of light in all the dark? And I keep thinking how Vladimir Nabokov portrays what life is like for a young man whose entire being is strangled by a world of abstraction, sinister invasive abstraction.
Dare I ask: to what extent are our own lives strangled by abstraction?
Link to the story: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/19...
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