There’s this beautiful turn, about 80% through Nabokov’s Ada, where the lovers are separated, after coming tantalizingly close to reunion. This time, it will take them 17 years to find each other again. They will be past fifty. They will have lost many of their qualities. In the meanwhile, one of them will write a treatise on the texture of time.
Time compresses beautifully in Ada – the first snatches of love at 12 and 14 occupy whole chapters. As the mind ages, time speeds up. One’s thirties pass in a single section. The last few decades go in as many pages.
That turn, though, just after the lovers withdraw again, is so lovely and dense with avoidance. We launch into our protagonist’s treatise. We contemplate the fabric of time for pages on end, and whether and how it is bound up in space, and infer backwards from what it does to what it is made of. When we open our eyes again, seventeen years are gone. The loved one is returned, a little less than what she was.
The metaphysical questions give the human heart its weight, Ada insists to me. The pain of absence is more than a person’s qualia – the absence itself is probative of some mystery of the human condition. I love you, by which I mean to say, you are a marker that fathoms the depth of my own mortality. Or: I stitch my heart to yours to ascertain something about the heart itself — whether it is one or many. And all our little dramas are different shadows of a larger question, standing between us and the sun. When a character becomes conscious of what their drama means, they grow a little divine.