In
a recorded lecture I found on Youtube given by the genius writer Vladimir Nabokov
I heard him say:
“Where
there is beauty, there is pity, because beauty must die, beauty always dies. The
manner dies with the matter and the world dies with the individual”
I was
struck by this profound statement, our world seizes to exists when we seize to exist,
this has made all the difference for me, and yet it felt so obvious, so basic that
we humans create our own universe and out own fate and yet so few of us see this.
When Nabokov said that beauty
entails pity, I'm not sure why I thought of the spilled bottle of milk I see soiling my neighbor’s front door step every morning, I thought of the blind baby robin I found on the ground,
swollen blue eyes bulging, featherless pink, its gaping yellow beak screaming, the
tragedy of the long fall and the desperate fragility that required no more than
a swift clumsy footstep. I thought of the white swan’s superior grace, gliding dreamlike
in endless rippled lakes and her majestic long neck always a question mark.
