“The problem proliferates in Nabokov, banality and longing chasing each other. Perhaps a real life is not an existence, however solid and undeniable, but the best or most memorable moments of an existence, instants of exaltation or insight, times when the self is most itself: real life rather than mere living. In The Eye, 1930, Nabokov's narrator glosses what is real for him as oppressive and tender, provoking excitement and torment, possessed of blinding possibilities of happiness, with tears, with a warm wind'. Or - we now approach one of the most subtle and urgent suggestions of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - what is real is the life we lead when we lose ourselves, when we abandon or are driven from the rational fiction of our identity; when we fall in love, for example, and especially when we fall deeply, hopelessly, brutally, stupidly in love.”
— Michael Wood
An overcoat, winter, a man facing no “imaginable” return. A “trembling” he equates to “cowardice.” A specific cowardice, a cowardice suitable for this “half-bearded man” wandering through the ice-cold corridors of train station hotel, “ready to weep,” ready to fall to his knees— there, in a snow-covered nowhere, unable to distinguish between being and not-being, “reduced in this world to that trembling.”
He makes a phone call to the castle whose owner is absent. A voice unmoving (SP?) his absence. A desperation to communicate with this person, to know if he is alive, to tell him that someone alive is calling him. The sound of dishes breaking inside a voice. The moment Bataille felt Kafka understood the “endless time” in writing for the operator to return and confirm no one was there. “Nobody is talking. Nothing can be done.” The line is busy. The person who wants to find the man forgot about the man on the line who seeks him. A series of groans rising from the chest as if from a frozen well. Hopeless. Even “the shadow of hope” is obliterated by this. And the man in the overcoat realizes a liberation: “I was dominated by the idea of knowing — at all costs.”
Snow falling across the station building. Nostrils prickled by the scent of the virgin snow crunching underfoot. The helpless accordion of chattering teeth. The sound emerging from his throat, “tremulous…oh…oh…oh…” – and the cello. The violin. The question of whether to continue and risk losing himself in the snow. The sound of things freezing: the silence of a world whose breath has been turned to ice. The man reminds himself that now, in this condition, “the only thing left for me to do is beyond my strength.” The blinding lashes of wind against the skin of his face. The curse raised “in the darkness against” the black of a “doomsday silence.” The crunching of shoes through ice. Snow quietly covering his tracks. The soothing realization that all bridges to the past had been cut, severed, slashed–there was no recognizable path backwards. Only forward. “In the night.” Only into the building with a lit interior. A body drawn to the heat of the stove, laughing with pleasure. Three railroad workers playing billiards. The bar owner pouring a grog. The humiliation of launching a joke that matches the ambiance. The feeling of degradation, finding oneself “the accessory of these people who expected nothing.” The slow dissociation, becoming “unreal, light,” a species of sight. Existing near a game of football players. Stimulated by caffeine pills and alcohol. Feeling courageous. Leaving the bar and setting out on the road to the castle, encountering the cold air. The stopping of the snow. An absurd “test” now avoidant, but with no metaphysical justification. Not willed by God. Not ordained by a choir of angels. Simply an effort to pursue his own “mania for questioning to the end.” Life gave him oranges. Life gave him what he loved. The world had given and taken away. The wind lifted the snow in small spirals and tunnels. No imaginable way out apart from the castle, the delirium of his days, all energy “strained to the breaking point,” a bit lip, a laugh cutting the air like a cry. “Who knows B’s limits better than I?”
At this inconceivable distance from “the world of calm reflections,” the man in the snow discovers that “unhappiness had that empty, electric sweetness which is like fingernails turned back.” The cold slowly drains his energy. The fact of “desiring” that “miserable” cold — drawing the cold deep into one’s lungs in order to keep moving — “transfigured these painful moments.” The wind coiling through the surrounding air, tracing a resemblance to that “eternal senseless reality known only once, in the room of a dead woman: a kind of suspended leap.” And so Diane meets Laure in the snow, in the misery of Bataille’s desiring.
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Claude Debussy’s Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon, L. 150
George Bataille, A Story of Rats