more ghosts

My 4am reading: an essay by WG Sebald on Nabokov, from a posthumous collection called Campo Santo. And five minutes reading Sebald is worth 50 minutes reading another writer: the connections he makes are always both delicate and robust, and his insights are deep. About Nabokov - another writer I have always revered, but haven't read enough of - have loved from afar, as it were - he writes:

"Nabokov repeatedly tried, as he himself has said, to cast a little light into the darkness lying on both sides of our life, and thus to illuminate our incomprehensible existence. Few subjects therefore, to my mind, preoccupied him more than the study of spirits, of which his famous passion for moths and butterflies was probably only an offshoot. At any rate, the most brilliant passages in his prose often give the impression that our worldly doings are being observed by some other species, not yet known to any system of taxonomy, whose emissaries sometimes assume a guest role in the plays performed by the living. Just as they appear to us, Nabokov conjectures, so we appear to them: fleeting, transparent beings of uncertain provenance and purpose. They are most commonly encountered in dreams, 'in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence,' and are 'silent, bothered, strangely depressed,' obviously suffering severely from their exclusion from society, and for that reason, says Nabokov, 'they sit apart, staring at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret'."

There's more, from both Nabokov and Sebald, about how a writer is like a ghost, how you can be a ghost in your own past - or am I extrapolating? - and about the creative act of writing itself:

"To set something so beautiful in motion, according to both Nabokov and the messianic theory of salvation, no gaudy show is necessary, only a tiny spiritual movement which releases the ideas that are shut inside our heads and always going around in circles, letting them out into a universe where, as in a good sentence, there is a place for everything and everything is in its place."