Signs and Symbols

"This, and much more, she accepted - for after all, living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case - mere possibilities of improvement." Honestly I was not even planning on reading the Signs and Symbols piece by Vladimir Nabokov - at least not during spring break. But I ended up having a little down-time at work this evening and was able to pull the pdf up on my phone...and wow. Without being overly wordy, excessively descriptive, or sickeningly emotional, this short, inconclusive piece is intriguing and beautifully written. It embodies lovely rhetoric with suspense and raw human emotion, all in less than four pages. 

Contemplating this piece, and more so simply the idea of life itself being a tragedy, I would have to say that I disagree with this summarization - life is not tragic...it has no ability to absorb such personification. Life simply is. And at a risk of sounding cliche, it is what we as individuals make it. This concept is especially hard for our current culture to grasp - because many people today are raised in a world where they feel a strong sense of entitlement, they focus solely on their own public image in society—when the emphasis of existence orbited survival, many of these feelings of worthlessness and confusion weren't as prevalent. Now, though, society has reached a mile-marker where people have excess time and excess intelligence for the lives many of us choose to live. We make situations tragic. There is no "good" situations, or "bad" situations - they are merely what we interpret them to be.

In Nabokov's story, the parents' entire outlook is changed once they make a decision to better their situation, and that of their son. Even before the situation is changed, the tragic element is taken out of it once a conscious choice is made. To complain that "life" is a tragedy is, I feel, is merely an attempt to escape one's own credibility.The reason, then, that many people are so miserable, is because we allow ourselves to strut and fret and then blame it on the "institution" of existence.

-AS