Vladimir Nabokov, “A Letter That Never Reached Russia.” The wonderful KB adds:
“If you replace the setting of Berlin with my home and the canal with the river, you will know of the only way I have found to deal with the feeling that life has deep meaning but the knowledge that - when considered in relation to the universe - it has very little or even none.”
This problem so well-phrased by K -our feeling that life has deep meaning but the general scientific and philosophic consensus that “in relation to the universe…it has very little or even none” (beyond what we fashion for ourselves, which is contingent and negotiable and both as profound and as superficial as a fairy tale)- this is the great problem of our time, maybe of all times.
With what meaning can a human be satisfied, sustained against fear and suffering? How much do we need our meaning substantiated outside ourselves? Is self-constructed meaning enough? Socially-constructed meaning? Or should we turn away from meaning and towards happiness, the simultaneously modest and grand happiness of the present, of observation, of Nabokov’s awareness of “the smiles of a dancing couple”?
