Dear Nabokovians,
This is my favorite moment in all of the Nabokov corpus, the
moral center if you will. It is Humbert seeing himself and not
seeing himself as he really is. I’ll spare all the explications, but it,
especially the parenthesis, can be read in any number of ways.
Unless it can be proven to me—to
me as I am now, today, with my heart and beard, and my putrefaction—that in
the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child had
been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless it 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.
Lolita, Part Two Chapter 31.
Eric Hyman
From: Vladimir Nabokov
Forum [mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU] On Behalf Of NABOKV-L
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2009 12:49 PM
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Subject: [NABOKV-L] BIRTHDAY: Ballooning . . .
Dear Nabokovians,
Please consider
forwarding some sort of birthday balloon (a favorite quotation, an image, a
Nabokovian memory, a poem, a witty salute, or anything else that strikes your
fancy) within the next few days. Such submissions will be released into
the ether on Nabokov's 110th birthday next Wednesday, April 23, for our
collective delight.
:) SES
Susan Elizabeth
Sweeney
Co-Editor, NABOKV-L
All private editorial communications, without exception, are
read by both co-editors.