How the Past Possesses the Present in "Signs and Symbols"

The object of this posting is to discuss how the past possesses the present in one of the short stories we read (I chose Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols"). However, being as my understanding of time isn't a linear one, I don't view the past and present as separate entities able to "posses" one another in the first place. Rather, I view it as some tendril extending from the conglomerate mess that is time to wrap around an individual and immerse them within it; the past doesn't, in this depiction of time, posses the present, but rather it possesses the person who is entirely separate from time itself. Take the image below for example; the octopus represents time and the person represents, well, a person. We have no "set place" in time, just as the person has no set place in relation to the octopus; he is simply experiencing whatever of the octopus is touching him at the moment.
 

Along with this idea of time, I would ask you to keep one more thing in mind: an Oscar Wilde quote, "Life is an imitation of art" which boils down to, "If it is genuine myth, we live it all." In his piece, Vladimir Nabokov describes a scene in which the old woman is looking through old family photos. She comes to one of her son before he was institutionalized and says, "The boy, aged six - that was when he drew wonderful birds with human hands and feet." At first glance, this seems like a quirky detail included to show the imagination (or perhaps the mental flaws) of the boy. It seems to just be one of those random details that authors include to have originality and therefore validity in their stories, right? That is certainly what I thought. That is, until only a few days ago when, by chance, I was watching a less-than-scholarly video on Youtube with my roommates titled "Have You Ever Been High as Fuck." In this video the man sings about his experience with getting high and says, "You close your eyes and you're on a chicken farm. The only problem is that the chickens have human arms...Have you ever been high as fuck?" You may ask yourself - did Nabokov and the writer of this song, Jon Lajoie, collaborate on the image of birds with human appendages? Was Nabokov high as fuck while writing his piece? I'd say no. Rather, they were touching the same tendril of time - accessing the same "ah-ha" moment in coming up with something "original" for their works.

Another aspect of Nabokov's piece that struck me was that there were three calls at the end. While this is linked to the unstated ending of the story (the son killing himself and the third call being from the institution to say that he succeeded), it also mirrors a scene from the New Testament of the bible wherein Peter denies Jesus three times before the rooster crows. Not only do the numbers overlap, but also the idea of a call/crow. And even as I am writing this I see that it is a rooster crowing, and it is a rooster in the image above this chunk of text. Oh how the "coincidences" continue to pile up...

I feel as though I could go through every single word in this story and find some sort of tie to another instance - another shared moment of time - in which the element is repeated. At the most basic of levels, all of these combinations of letters have before been made. Every word he uses has been used before. Maybe even every sentence. Once our language has been around long enough, we will surely recognize sentences as the basic unit not just the word. And maybe we'll even eventually recognize entire stories as the basic unit. Or have we done so already?