So it went on, that obsession and that despair and that nightmarish impossibility to swindle destiny, until a certain first of April, of all dates.
Tolstoy’s prose keeps pace with our pulses, his characters seem to move with the same swing as the people passing under our window while we sit reading his book.
A procession of silver pencils marched down an endless tunnel of corruption.
I have but followed nature. I am nature’s faithful hound. Why then this horror that I cannot shake off?
Oh, Lolita, had you loved me thus!
All I manage to glimpse is an effect of melting light on one side of her misty hair, and in this, I suspect, I am insidiously influenced by the standard artistry of modern photography and I feel how much easier writing must have been in former days when one’s imagination was not hemmed in by innumerable visual aids, and a frontiersman looking at his first giant cactus or his first high snows was not necessarily reminded of a tire company’s pictorial advertisement.
And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.
Caress the details, the divine details. In high art and pure science detail is everything.
The artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye – and this is the artistic result.
Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control.
The old and the new, the liberal touch and the patriarchal one, fatal poverty and fatalistic wealth got fantastically interwoven in that strange first decade of our century.
Who cares,′ cried Van, ‘who cares about all those stale myths, what does it matter – Jove or Jehovah, spire or cupola, mosques in Moscow, or bronzes and bonzes, and clerics, and relics, and deserts with bleached camel ribs? They are merely the dust and mirages of the communal mud.
In other more deeply moral worlds than this pellet of muck, there might exist restraints, principles, transcendental consolations, and even a certain pride in making happy someone one does not really love; but on this planet, Lucettes are doomed.
Literature is not a pattern of ideas but a pattern of images. Ideas do not matter much in comparison to a book’s imagery and magic. The word, the expression, the image is the true function of literature. Not ideas.
Love, most likely. They don’t know how dreary it is, how degrading.
I was unbathed, unshaven, and had had no bowel movement. My nerves were a-jangle.
And a tiny looper caterpillar would be there, too, measuring, like a child’s finger and thumb, the rim of the table, and every now and then stretching upward to grope, in vain, for the shrub from which it had been dislodged.
My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses.
Finally it gave up- as some day life will give up- bothering me.
Natural selection,” in the Darwinian sense, could not explain the miraculous coincidence of imitative aspect and imitative behavior, nor could one appeal to the theory of “the struggle for life” when a protective device was carried to a point of mimetic subtlety, exuberance, and luxury far in excess of a predator’s power of appreciation. I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.