[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible
thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable
contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. Sherry-red letters of light marked a
Camera Shop. A large thermometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt
on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov's Jewelry company had a display of
artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in
the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff Laundry. On the other side of the street a
garage said in its sleep--genuflection lubricity; and corrected itself to
Gulflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning,
in the velvet heavens. How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen! This
was not yet the last.
Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further
across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the
outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full
second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters
saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a
latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made
shadow-graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I
was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
31
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale
(between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case.
With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love.
Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years
before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to
whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a
Protestant's drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to
deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those
frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the
finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the
great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple
human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic
file:///D|/docs/fiction/Nabokov%20-%20Lolita.txt (204 of 224)18/12/2003 23:07:54
file:///D|/docs/fiction/Nabokov%20-%20Lolita.txt
eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the
foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as
I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction--that in
the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child
named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless
this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for
the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of
articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
32
There was the day, during our first trip--our first circle of
paradise--when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to
ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a
boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just
two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn--to mention only mentionable matters.
There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made
her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on--a roller
rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted
to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance
combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face . . . that
look I cannot exactly describe . . . an expression of helplessness so
perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just
because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration--and every
limit presupposes something beyond it--hence the neutral illumination. And
when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of
a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what
reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and
dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure
Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in
an outside world that was real to her.
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves
into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of
Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a
concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my
person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to
something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton
Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on
file:///D|/docs/fiction/Nabokov%20-%20Lolita.txt (205 of 224)18/12/2003 23:07:54 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl exclamation.htw.pl
rotting Europe. I was alone to enjoy the innocent night and my terrible
thoughts. A wire receptacle on the curb was very particular about acceptable
contents: Sweepings. Paper. No Garbage. Sherry-red letters of light marked a
Camera Shop. A large thermometer with the name of a laxative quietly dwelt
on the front of a drugstore. Rubinov's Jewelry company had a display of
artificial diamonds reflected in a red mirror. A lighted green clock swam in
the linenish depths of Jiffy Jeff Laundry. On the other side of the street a
garage said in its sleep--genuflection lubricity; and corrected itself to
Gulflex Lubrication. An airplane, also gemmed by Rubinov, passed, droning,
in the velvet heavens. How many small dead-of-night towns I had seen! This
was not yet the last.
Let me dally a little, he is as good as destroyed. Some way further
across the street, neon lights flickered twice slower than my heart: the
outline of a restaurant sign, a large coffee-pot, kept bursting, every full
second or so, into emerald life, and every time it went out, pink letters
saying Fine Foods relayed it, but the pot could still be made out as a
latent shadow teasing the eye before its next emerald resurrection. We made
shadow-graphs. This furtive burg was not far from The Enchanted Hunters. I
was weeping again, drunk on the impossible past.
31
At this solitary stop for refreshments between Coalmont and Ramsdale
(between innocent Dolly Schiller and jovial Uncle Ivor), I reviewed my case.
With the utmost simplicity and clarity I now saw myself and my love.
Previous attempts seemed out of focus in comparison. A couple of years
before, under the guidance of an intelligent French-speaking confessor, to
whom, in a moment of metaphysical curiosity, I had turned over a
Protestant's drab atheism for an old-fashioned popish cure, I had hoped to
deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being. On those
frosty mornings in rime-laced Quebec, the good priest worked on me with the
finest tenderness and understanding. I am infinitely obliged to him and the
great Institution he represented. Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple
human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic
file:///D|/docs/fiction/Nabokov%20-%20Lolita.txt (204 of 224)18/12/2003 23:07:54
file:///D|/docs/fiction/Nabokov%20-%20Lolita.txt
eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the
foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as
I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction--that in
the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child
named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless
this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for
the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of
articulate art. To quote an old poet:
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
32
There was the day, during our first trip--our first circle of
paradise--when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to
ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a
boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just
two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn--to mention only mentionable matters.
There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made
her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on--a roller
rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted
to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance
combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face . . . that
look I cannot exactly describe . . . an expression of helplessness so
perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just
because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration--and every
limit presupposes something beyond it--hence the neutral illumination. And
when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of
a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what
reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and
dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure
Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in
an outside world that was real to her.
And I have still other smothered memories, now unfolding themselves
into limbless monsters of pain. Once, in a sunset-ending street of
Beardsley, she turned to little Eva Rosen (I was taking both nymphets to a
concert and walking behind them so close as almost to touch them with my
person), she turned to Eva, and so very serenely and seriously, in answer to
something the other had said about its being better to die than hear Milton
Pinski, some local schoolboy she knew, talk about music, my Lolita remarked:
"You know, what's so dreadful about dying is that you are completely on
file:///D|/docs/fiction/Nabokov%20-%20Lolita.txt (205 of 224)18/12/2003 23:07:54 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]