The Istanbulite

There's a powerful excerpt from “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov, a brilliant writer who is more known for “Lolita,” but his other works are sometimes overshadowed:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;

I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I

Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.

In this opening to his poem within the novel, Nabokov captures the nature of reality and the tragic consequences of misconception.

The waxwing sees the sky in a window and, thinking it real, fatally crashes into it.

This can be interpreted as a reflection on the consequences of misunderstanding or being misled and how life's “unfairness” can sometimes be a result of our perceptions.

Often, what we perceive as injustices can be traced back to misconceptions or false beliefs:

The window, in its essence, isn't malicious or deceitful; it simply reflects the world around it.

The bird's tragic collision with the window isn't a result of the window's intent to harm but rather a consequence of its inherent reflective property and the bird's misinterpretation of that reflection.

This can be extended as a metaphor to many experiences in life:

What might seem as acts of unfairness or malignance may often be neutral events that arise due to the inherent nature of things, and the tribulation results from our perception, interpretation, or reaction to them.

The liability then lies on us to understand and navigate the world with awareness and discernment, recognising that what may appear as one thing might be something else entirely.

How often do we mistake the reflection for the real, and how might our lives change if we learned to see beyond the surface?

#ReflectiveReading #RealityCheck #IllusionOfPerception

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