Dr. Falternfels was writing and smiling; his sandwich was half unwrapped; his dog was dead.
That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental.
One of the latticed squares in a small cobwebby casement window at the turn of the staircase was glazed with ruby, and that raw wound among the unstained rectangles and its asymmetrical position – a knight’s move from the top – always strangely disturbed me.
But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one’s position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge.
I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.
By psychoanalyzing this poem, I notice it is really a maniac’s masterpiece. The stark, stiff, lurid rhymes correspond very exactly to certain perspectiveless and terrible landscapes and figures, and magnified parts of landscapes and figures, as drawn by psychopaths in tests devised by their astute trainers.
It’s tempting, emptiness.
And when he went to bed and listened to the trains passing through that cheerless house in which lived several Russian lost shades, the whole of life seemed like a piece of film-making where heedless extras knew nothing of the picture in which they were taking part.
We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing.
I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. Its reflection fills the oval mirror above the leathern couch where my uncle sits, gloating over a tattered book. A sense of security, of well-being, of summer warmth pervades my memory. That robust reality makes a ghost of the present. The mirror brims with brightness; a bumblebee has entered the room and bumps against the ceiling. Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.
I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
It was like some dreadful silent ballet, the male dancer holding the ballerina by her foot and streaking down through watery twilight.
The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door banged.
An electric milk van on fat tires rolling creamily.
The beastly and beautiful merged at one point, and it is that borderline I would like to fix, and I feel I fail to do so utterly.
A storm of sobs was filling my chest.
You are an artist,′ I said – to say something.
It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations.
How little I knew of his life! But now I was learning something every instant. The door standing slightly ajar was the best link imaginable.
I have lived an agonizing life, and I would like to describe that agony to you – but I am obsessed by the fear that there will not be time enough.