I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. Vladimir Nabokov
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After a long and mysterious journey, a man arrives at a place where a process of chemical transformation takes place. John Shade perceives and transforms the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. This process is analogous to the conversion of the material world into mental energy. The poet has begun with a physical perception.

He has captured it on paper or canvas or stone or air. But the first step is merely to register an actuality. The second step is to turn that perception into a statement about a vision.

The third step is to find that vision in the material world around him, to search for it there as well as in his own mind.

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