You know that Nabokov traced the development of his consciousness to one of his earliest memories, the recognition that he and his parents were distinct human beings. And you know that in Speak, Memory, Nabokov often writes of memory as if the recalled events happened to someone else (“. . . I see my diminutive self . . .”) or as if they are occurring on a movie screen, viewed from his “present ridge of remote, isolated, almost uninhabited time.” And though, let’s face it, you’re never going to be half the writer Nabokov was, you can appreciate this distinction between past and present, between the boy one was and the man one is.