There’s an old man in a story by Nabokov, a terrible old man, whom the narrator makes quite sure you could have no love for – he’s lecherous, sour, selfish – but perhaps still you can feel sympathy because he is a dreamer whose dream has gone stale yet still he clings to it, a dream that “had been in his youth a delightfully exciting plan but had now gradually become a dark, passionate obsession.”

There’s a difference between passion in its purest form and the obsession it can become as time goes on, and it’s easy to confuse the two. Passion is the stuff of life, gives us vitality. Obsession might be your reason for living but at the same time it drains your life out of you, making you live only for it; it exists at your expense.

The old man clings to his shop as the “symbolic link between his dreary existence and the phantom of perfect happiness.” He’s become a spectator of his own life. He sees it as it is and as it might have been. When at night he dreams, it is like watching a film, a sentimental story that ends, as films do, by plopping the viewer back into the reality of their own life – in this case back into a dismal reality of his own making.

Nabokov makes it hard to feel sympathy for the old man perhaps so that we will look away from him in disgust and back at ourselves. What passion has become stale for you? What must you leave behind? And what must you seize now in order to live life more fully?

(I’ve been reading “The Aurelian” in Nabokov’s Collected Stories, published by Penguin Classics in 2010.)