Time and Ebb

Strangely, Nabokov wrote the short story "Time and Ebb" in 1945, when he was 46 years old. The story is an old man's reminisces of his long-lost childhood in the World War II period, and contains not a line of dialogue. This seems an odd topic for a middle-aged writer at the peak of his talents to traffic in, but we forgive him. And the reason we forgive him are passages like this:

"And so I shall tiptoe away, taking leave of my childhood at its most typical point, in its most plastic posture: arrested by a deep drone that vibrates and gathers in volume overhead, stock-still, oblivious of the meek bicycle it straddles, one foot on the pedal, the toe of the other touching the asphalted earth, eyes, chin, and ribs lifted to the naked sky where a warplane comes with unearthly speed which only the expanse of its medium renders unhurried as ventral view changes to rear view, and wings and hum dissolve in the distance. Admirable monsters, great flying machines, they have gone, they have vanished like that flock of swans which passed with a mighty swish of multitudinous wings one spring night above Knights Lake in Maine, from the unknown into the unknown: swans of a species never determined by science, never seen before, never seen since -- and then nothing but a lone star remained in the sky, like an asterisk to an undiscovered footnote."