In the first lines of his autobiography Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov delivers a powerful reflection on pre-life, life, and death: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” This, as Alfred Apfel Jr. states in his The Annotated Lolita essay, is a testament to Nabokov’s treatment of life (and, indeed, his art) as a “miracle of vision” and, above all, “a sequence of attempts to unscramble the ‘pictures’ glimpsed in that ‘brief crack of light.’” But can Nabokov’s haunting portrait of existence be applied to reality—either his layered, self-parodyingly artificial realities or our own equally fickle ones?

In our modern age and especially the past year, our cradle of truth is subject to a peculiar and sometimes hazy dichotomy, defined as much by the context of negative space provided by those welling darknesses on either side as by its own suspended and tumultuous existence—its self-perception of light—while even that brief crack of truth itself is bitterly, beautifully scrambled. Such is the nature of our connection to “reality.” Such, likewise, is the nature of our disconnection to “reality.”

Thus, (dis)connect explores a tension wherein connection and disconnection are simultaneously polarized and interwound within the other’s inmost fiber: each feeding off the other, each defined by what the other is not, each solipsizing the other, and each clouding both themselves and the other in a smokescreen of literal or metaphorical fustian. (This is also the aesthetic relationship Nabokov enshrines between Humbert and Lolita.)

Here, perhaps, is where we may list cases borne by that frictious space between connection and disconnection: the storming of the US Capitol, the increasing polarization of our national discourse, the forming and breaking of various communal ethics, the Black Lives Matter protests, and even the new means through which we seek literal human connection in a time of modern plague. These events are all “real,” but the matters they encompass may all be settled expediently into our respective mental thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs.

However, in our complex world, it will not be news that the singular “reality,” wherever it may dwell, is utterly resistant to that sort of explicatory attempt, though an attempt must be made by every individual in order to exist and move through time. When the truth eludes our black-and-white terms—and if we manage not to cart it off to that proverbial graveyard of nationalistic trappings and two-word presidential slogans too vague to pose any sensible counterargument against—we may even simply ignore it. As a people, as a media, and as a conscience, we ignore it. Perhaps, though, it may be what we have ignored that will have escaped the least scarred by our hot takes and hatreds, our sympathies and simplifications.

This foreword, despite its decidedly cynical outlook, is not an indictment of society or its institutions. It is, instead, a reminder of our multitudes, whose consequences have been exacerbated by the events of the past year.

It is a reminder to those who can lightly complain about the coronavirus or who can espouse a roseate view of quarantine as an introvert’s heaven: our views are valid, but we are only able to enjoy or complain about such matters because of our economic and social positions. All the art in this literary magazine is only made possible by the artists’ standings and voices, and by extension, their power. Not everyone is granted this power: remember all that has been omitted in this magazine.

It is a reminder that disconnection and connection are both disparity. Even as we seem more connected by some means and conversations, billions are left out of those conversations—not just the discourse of the Internet but many economic, political, social, and cultural conversations. That disparity has often worsened, and millions will have suffered and died in the ghostly dredges beneath any gentle golden age of ours.

It is a reminder of my mother, who stood in the sunlit kitchen after reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and wondered aloud what to say to those who tell her, “Where are you from from?” or “You speak English very well” or “I’m not racist at all,” which she had never been too concerned about before. We may speak in abstract terms of perspectives and paradigms, but even if no single Enlightenment can be reached because of the increasingly elusive nature of truth, we as individuals can still all afford to shift our lenses.

It is a reminder of who we are—we, beating “on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” We have in our human nature, as well, a desire to sit quietly and sift through that scrambled miracle of vision: to chase Nabokov’s butterflies; to play Nabokov’s games of chess; and to don and doff Nabokov’s flimsy realities, trying each sick and beautiful new thing, all in search of the truth. We know how important that truth is, for our bafflement and outrage as a society always arise where our realities collide. And I hope we will continue to seek that truth—lest the cradle rip apart.

Written by Sarah Liu