Fughe ‘dal’ tempo, fughe ‘nel’ tempo: Borges, McTaggart, Nabokov

Abstract

This paper presents two different kinds of relationship between the concepts of ‘flight’ and ‘temporality’, which are resumed by two nabokovean sentences. We can call the first one ‘flight out of time’: this kind of relationship reveals a sceptical attitude towards the real existence of time, an attitude shared by writers (Borges) and philosophers (McTaggart). The second one can be called ‘flight in time’: according to Nabokov, temporality is at the heart of art and literature, and so it’s impossible to realize a true ‘escape’ from time. In this sense, the real aim of the good artist should be the flight in the pure medium of time, namely in the ‘texture’ (different from the ‘text’, the ‘content’, of time) of the temporal dimension.