Time stops at the point of severance

In Speak, Memory, Nabokov makes the poetic, or the playful, speculation that Russian children before the Revolution--and his exile--were blessed with a surfeit of sensual impressions to compensate them for what was to come. Of course, fate doesn't play such premonitory games, but memory can perform retrospective maneuvers to compensate for fate. Loss is a magical preservative. Time stops at the point of severance, and no subsequent impressions muddy the picture you have in mind. The house, the garden, the country you have lost remain forever as you remember them. Nostalgia--that most lyrical of feelings--crystallizes around these images like amber. Arrested within it, the house, the past, is clear, vivid, made more beautiful by the medium in which it is held and by its stillness.

Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation. NY: Penguin Books, 1989. 115-116. Print.