Midterm Paper

It is the sign of the true artist, the true master of his craft, when he can put the siplest of phrases down on paper and bring to mind a whole slew of events to the reader. Yet, it is not even a phrse, but rather a pair of words that, by themselves mean nothing, and together mean even less. Yet somehow we, as readers, are shown a full world, presented a full story in less time than it takes most of us to even begin to paint the picture of our story.

These are the first impressions of "picnic, lightning." It is perhaps the simplest and greatest of the many moments in the novel Lolita when Humbert Humbert is describing the death of his mother, but in its simplicity there is a power that cannot be denied. The reader is plunged into a world, if even for the briefest of seconds, where we are faced with a grizzly death that is left to our own imaginations. Even those of us who first simply skim over these seemingly unimportant words are eventually drawn back to them, as if somehow they will give us a true glance into the mind of one of the most infamous characters in literary history.

It is one of the amazing feats of Nabokov, much like his class list, a kind of poetry in the simplest of places. Yet Nabokov is not the first to have used two seemingly innocuous words that have resonated with a power that little else can. In the bible there is a small passage in John, chapter 11, verse 35. It simply states: "Jesus wept." From this, as with "picnic, lightning," we are barraged with images that tell a story so powerful that we become speechless, perhaps even envious of the great masters who were able to do what we could only dream of. We write our letters and essays, our novels and plays, yet none can even compare to two small words in the middle of a page, placed there as if by accident.

Nabokov has then, through two famous words, given us a glimpse of the true power he held over his craft, the absolute mastery he exuded over each word of each line fo his books. All are placed there with the delicacy and intricacy of a master sculptor trying to piece together ten thousand tiny pebbles into the masterpiece of a lifetime. Perhaps the freatest thing about this ten thousand piece puzzle is that each piece, when examined closely, tells its own amazing story. With "picnic, lightning," we are assaulted by a series of painful images that each of us can relate to. Perhaps they are more powerful in that the tragic event portrayed happens to a loved one, and so each of us sees, not Humbert's mother but our own, standing in a serene, almost dreamlike, world that turns suddenly and ferociously nightmarish. It is something that we have all feared, the sudden loss of a loved one in the happiest of times, and to have it staring at us from the page, our deepest fears immortalized in two words, is a very powerful and moving experience.

Perhaps that, then, is why the two words "picnic, lightning" inspire art to this day because like the best art it is something simple and primal that reaches to our very core. It is this ability to lay bare the most intimate and darkest fears of our souls, in two words, that Nabokov should be praised for. Throughout the book Lolita he shows us this horrid world that we do not dare be a part of, that we do not dare to glance at simply due to the fact that we do not want to see ourselves as part of this dark world. Yet it is even before Nabokov reveals the true dark nature of his main character that we are first introduced to this horrid world. Consider it a shot over the bow so to speak, a warning to all who would enter that the knowledge contained within these pages is not for the faint of heart. Remember this as you travel deeper into the book that you were warned the most elegant and powerful way possible. A simple phrase, two words, "picnic, lightning."