Enigma of a Synesthete

When you're an English major, everything is a coincidence.
Take yesterday, for example. I got up at 5:30 to open the coffee shop, and as I was waiting for the rest of the town to wake up I sat behind the counter immersed in Lolita. Eventually customers started to trickle in, and the second person I encountered that day seemed to sense my annoyance with having to be pulled away from my book to serve him . In an attempt to make conversation he asked what I was reading. When I showed him Lolita, he asked me if I knew that the author of that book had some strange condition where his senses were mixed up and he mistook one sensation for another. My interest was peaked and I wanted to know more, but this guy didn't have a lot more to offer. But even though the effects of this disorder were vague, and I really couldn't be sure if this guy even knew what he was talking about, that made so much sense to me. It seemed like it would take a man with some crazy disorder of that nature to be able to write this way!
"Look at this tangle of thorns"
The agony! I can't get it out of my head. Nabokov's menacing phrases are evoking weird feelings in me. I love this book!
I got off work, sit through a class that was, in comparison to our usual classes, a little dull, kind of redundant. Well, it was what it was: review. Until... Synesthesia. I wasn't even listening until I heard that "blurring and mixing of the senses". My interest was peaked once again. So it does exist! I was surprised we weren't talking about it in reference to Nabokov though. Synesthetes experience one or more sensations in response to an entirely different sensation. They see sounds and taste colors. And additionally, the mind of a synesthete is disorganized in such a way that emotion is superior to logic. Wow, what a neat condition to "suffer" from. Just knowing something like that about the author explains so much; it gives so much order to his brilliance. No wonder he can write so sensually...
"Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with"
When Sexson mentioned in class that some people were having trouble reading this book because of it's subject matter, I felt a little bit guilty. Mainly because I'm not at all phased by the subject matter of the story. I don't feel repelled by it, in fact, I feel very passionately about this book. It's not the subject matter that evokes these feelings, it's the passion of the prose, his language, making me feel things. I can just envision Nabokov writing this, how the words must have just poured out of him and onto the page in some synesthetic surge of genius. Lolita is the first book we've read in class this semester that makes me melt. Every sentence is a string of "words chosen out of desire". This is why I am an English major; I revel in such works.
Yesterday's discoveries are giving me such a heightened appreciation for Lolita as well as giving new order to Nabokov's mind and the style of writing it produced. I can't wait to gain more understanding (through Lolita and