Further “rhymes”
A step on the stairs is nothing, 1 :
Nabokov’s memory from childhood of ascending stairs
with eyes closed so that he wouldn’t know when he’d
reached the top. His mother would playfully call “step”
as she had all the way up — young Vladimir’s
“foot would be automatically lifted… and then… would
sink into the phantasm of a step, padded, as it were,
with the infinitely elastic stuff of its own nonexistence.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, “Now Remember”, p. 25
A step on the stairs is nothing, 2 :
“You must have experienced the sensation of
stepping forward in the darkness, thinking that it is
the last step on the stairs only to find that it isn’t there.
You are thrown momentarily into a state of complete disarray.
Or when, in your bed, no matter how much care you take
before falling asleep, your legs suddenly slacken and you fall
you don’t know where. Ah well, in this country it’s always like
that. Everything is made of the same material as that absent step. “
—Jean Ferry, “Letter to an Unknown Person” published in
“Le méchanicien et autres contes” (1951), Gallimard