Today we have a prompt inspired by the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.
For me, reading Nabokov is often transportive, and this is especially true of his memoir Speak, Memory, which is full of shimmering passages about his childhood. On just about every page, there’s a sense of the sublime—that dizzying overwhelm at the cliff’s edge, or staring up at a star full of skies. Writing allowed him to contain those experiences; rendering it in vivid, glorious detail allowed him to transfer some portion of that intensity to someone else.
Feel free to take this prompt anywhere you like. Maybe write about a childhood memory, or maybe a more recent experience of the sublime. Use it as an opportunity to remember and relish a thrilling experience—to dress it up, to let it dazzle, let it shine.
—Suleika
The Blessed Shiver, inspired by Vladimir Nabokov
“I may be inordinately fond of my earliest impressions, but then I have reasons to be grateful to them. They led the way to a veritable Eden of visual and tactile sensations. One night, during a trip abroad, in the fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car (probably on the long-extinct Mediterranean Train de Luxe, the one whose six cars had the lower part of their body painted in umber and the panels in cream) and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth. I had probably managed to undo and push up the tight tooled blind at the head of my berth, and my heels were cold, but I still kept kneeling and peering. Nothing is sweeter or stranger than to ponder those first thrills.”
Your prompt for today:
Write about the earliest moment that you remember in overwhelming detail—from a journey, at home, or among people you loved (or hated). Write about it as Nabokov set out to do in his work: “to transform [it] into something that can be turned over to the reader in printed characters to have him cope with the blessed shiver.”