“In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy - because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must intercept. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme. Some of the spies are detached observers, such as glass surfaces and still pools; others, such as coats in store windows, are prejudiced witnesses, lynchers at heart; others again (running water, storms) are hysterical to the point of insanity, have a distorted opinion of him and grotesquely misinterpret his actions. He must be always on his guard and devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things. The very air he exhales is indexed and filed away.”
Riaz (of No Correlation and these amazing photos) posted this quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.”
Nabokov was such a talented stylist it’s almost hard to bear; I could read this over and over. The “…darkly gesticulating trees,” the composition of the “awful messages” from nature, the world as cipher coding a message for oneself, the glass and the coats-as-lynchers: this whole passage ought to be required reading for students of psychosis, fear, and/or literature.
“He must…devote every minute and module of life to the decoding of the undulation of things.”
