Speak, Memory--Chapter 2

"All one could do was to glimpse, amid the haze and the chimeras, something real ahead, just as persons endowed with an unusual persistence of diurnal cerebration are able to perceive in their deepest sleep, somewhere beyond the throes of an entangled and inept nightmare, the ordered reality of the waking hour." --Vladimir Nabokov, page 39

This sentence comes in the same chapter that Nabokov writes about his and his mother's shared hallucinations and thoughts, and her lack of religion. I like that he brings up how his mother related to him and then throws out this idea for the reader. This sentence shows how you can live without religion; sensing an afterlife (or at least a purpose to life) comes naturally if you can think about it, like being able to come back to reality from a dream. I hope I'm not misunderstanding what "diurnal cerebration" means, but I really love the way he expresses this idea. It's a unique way to tackle the subject of mortality, something that every writer addresses at some point in his/her life.