/lit/ - Literature

explain to me, without using buzzwords or REEEEing, why he's wrong/bad

>>18234428
one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do no have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous achievement of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is - a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) - a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Poe can still frighten a reader, especially late at night. It has to do, as Nabokov understood, with language, with the spaces that vowels carve out of the darkness and the way night loosens the hold of the literal world so that things move and happen in unanticipated ways. Shadows detach from their forms and develop a will.

should I even bother with nabokov if I found lolita to be an ordinary book? pale fire and ada, or ardor, any better?

>best
Pale Fire

>worst
Bend Sinister

>Overrated
Pnin

>Underrated
Invitation to a Beheading

>Playboy: Man’s understanding of these mysteries is embodied in his concept of a Divine Being. As a final question, do you believe in God?

>Nabokov: To be quite candid—and what I am going to say now is something I never said before, and I hope it provokes a salutary little chill: I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more.

OK, I give up. I've been thinking about this for 7 years, and couldn't figure it out on my own. What the fuck did he mean by that answer? Does he or does he not believe, and in what?