[NPPF] Childhood Epilepsy

[sZ]

Vladimir Nabokov. Inspiration:
(written on November 20, 1972, for Saturday Review)

A special study, which I do not plan to conduct, would reveal, probably,
that inspiration is seldom dwelt upon nowadays even by the worst reviewers
of our best prose. I say "our" and I say "prose" because I am thinking of
American works of fiction, including my own stuff. It would seem that this
reticence is somehow linked up with a sense of decorum. Conformists suspect
that to speak of "inspiration" is as tasteless and old-fashioned as to stand
up for the Ivory Tower. Yet inspiration exists as do towers and tusks.
One can distinguish several types of inspiration, which intergrade, as all
things do in this fluid and interesting world of ours, while yielding
gracefully to a semblance of classification. A prefatory glow, not unlike
some benign variety of the aura before an epileptic attack, is something the
artist learns to perceive very early in life. This feeling of tickly
well-being branches through him like the red and the blue in the picture of
a skinned man under Circulation. As it spreads, it banishes all awareness of
physical discomfort- youth's toothache as well as the neuralgia of old age.
The beauty of it is that, while completely intelligible (as if it were
connected with a known gland or led to an expected climax), it has neither
source nor object. It expands, glows, and subsides without revealing its
secret. In the meantime, however, a window has opened, an auroral wind has
blown, every exposed nerve has tingled. Presently all dissolves: the
familiar worries are back and the eyebrow redescribes its arc of pain; but
the artist knows he is ready.
http://mochola.narod.ru/nablib.htm