Trifling away, here is the link bt. "whims
and megrims," mentioned in yesterday's posting to Nab-L.
It was extracted from Nabokov's
introduction to "Bend Sinister".
"The main theme of Bend
Sinister, then, is the beating of Krug's loving heart, the torture an intense
tenderness is subjected to — and it is for the sake of the pages about David and
his father that the book was written and should be read. Two other themes
accompany the main one: the theme of dim-brained brutality which thwarts its own
purpose by destroying the right child and keeping the wrong one; and the theme
of Krug's blessed madness when he suddenly
perceives the simple reality of things and knows but cannot express in the words
of his world that he and his son and wife and everybody else are merely my whims
and megrims."
Nabokov rendered the problem related to
"incommunicability" in a very clever Nabokov-God way. Like the character in
"Cloud Castle Lake," who toils with philistinism and stereotypes, Krug
("circle") is dismissed, although the reader is still stuck with Nabokov and his
novel.
A few weeks ago I searched for an
easy-to-copy Nabokov sentence in the internet, but found another
one that I couldn't place which was news to me.
I remembered this chance encounter now, for
it's spirit is similar to the sentence I've just underlined from BS's
preface.
Here it is: "Our
imagination flies -- we are its shadow on the earth."
— Vladimir Nabokov