Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.

Nabokov’s image treats existence not as a decline toward darkness but as an opening into light: “life” is a sunrise, a beginning filled with color, surprise, and expanding perception. By extending the metaphor to death as a potentially “greater” sunrise, the line resists conventional fear of mortality and hints at a speculative, aesthetic, or metaphysical hope—an afterlife, an enlargement of consciousness, or at least a final transformation as wondrous as birth into the world. The phrasing is deliberately tentative (“I do not see why…”), suggesting not doctrine but a rationally framed wonder: if beginnings can be radiant, endings might also be.