“[The purpose of storytelling is] to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”
Vladimir Nabokov, quoted by Colum McCann in an editorial about Ulysses in the NYT. My father sent it to me to support his assertion, made often before, that when “we remember a time in the past kindly, nostalgically, even a time we know we experienced as difficult, awkward and unsatisfactory, we may be seeing life more truly than we knew how to then. This goes contrary to the more common idea that we distort the past in order to spare or deceive ourselves, although we may do that too.”
I like the idea that reality is more sublime than we think it as we experience it, that only “the kindly mirrors of future times” permit us to accurately perceive its “fragrant tenderness.”
