Describing his life with Rita, Humbert Humbert (the narrator and main character in VN’s novel Lolita, 1955) quotes Rita's words "going round and round, like a God-damn mulberry moth:"
She was twice Lolita’s age and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult, weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes, and angular, rapidly sketched profile, and a most appealing ensellure to her supple back - I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood. I picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, or more narrowly, between Toylestown and Blake, at a darkishly burning bar under the sign of the Tiger-moth, where she was amiably drunk: she insisted we had gone to school together, and she placed her trembling little hand on my ape paw. My senses were very slightly stirred but I decided to give her a try; I did – and adopted her as a constant companion. She was so kind, was Rita, such a good sport, that I daresay she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy, an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine, out of sheer chumminess and compassion.
When I first met her she had but recently divorced her third husband – and a little more recently had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant – the others, the mutables, were too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother was – and no doubt still is – a prominent, pasty-faced, suspenders-and-painted-tie-wearing politician, mayor and boaster of his ball-playing, Bible-reading, grain-handling home town. For the last eight years he had been paying his great little sister several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she would never never enter great little Grainball City. She told me, with wails of wonder, that for some God-damn reason every new boy friend of hers would first of all take her Grainball-ward: it was a fatal attraction; and before she knew what was what, she would find herself sucked into the lunar orbit of the town, and would be following the flood-lit drive that encircled it “going round and round,” as she phrased it, “like a God-damn mulberry moth.” (2.26)
In his Essais (Book One, Chapter XIX — To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die) Michel de Montaigne (a French philosopher, 1533-1592, who in 1581-1585 served as mayor of Bordeaux) quotes Lucretius, a Roman poet and philosopher (c. 99-55 BC) who in his didactic poem De rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things") says: "Uersamur ibidem, atque insumus usque (we go round and round, always in the same circle):"
"And, come the worst that can come, the distribution and variety of all the acts of my comedy are performed in a year. If you have observed the revolution of my four seasons, they comprehend the infancy, the youth, the virility, and the old age of the world: the year has played his part, and knows no other art but to begin again; it will always be the same thing:"
Uersamur ibidem, atque insumus usque.
[We go round and round, always in the same circle. Lucretius, iii. 1093]
Earlier in the same chapter of his Essais Montaigne quotes Catullus, a Roman poet (c. 87-54 BC) who mentions his aetas florida (florid age):
In truth, in all things, if nature do not help a little, it is very hard for art and industry to perform anything to purpose. I am in my own nature not melancholic, but meditative; and there is nothing I have more continually entertained myself withal than imaginations of death, even in the most wanton time of my age:
"Jucundum quum aetas florida ver ageret."
["When my florid age rejoiced in pleasant spring." --Catullus, lxviii.]
According to John Ray, Jr. (the author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript), Rita has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida:
For the benefit of old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the “real” people beyond the “true” story, a few details may be given as received from Mr. “Windmuller,” or “Ramsdale,” who desires his identity suppressed so that “the long shadow of this sorry and sordid business” should not reach the community to which he is proud to belong. His daughter, “Louise,” is by now a college sophomore, “Mona Dahl” is a student in Paris. “Rita” has recently married the proprietor of a hotel in Florida. Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. “Vivian Darkbloom” has written a biography, “My Cue,” to be publshed shortly, and critics who have perused the manuscript call it her best book. The caretakers of the various cemeteries involved report that no ghosts walk.
Describing his life in Ramsdale as Charlotte's lodger, Humbert Humbert identifies himself with Catullus:
As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc. On second thought, I may as well give those imaginations a kick in the pants. I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita. She would be thirteen on January 1. In two years or so she would cease being a nymphet and would turn into a “young girl,” and then, into a “college girl” - that horror of horrors. The word “forever” referred only to my own passion, to the eternal Lolita as reflected in my blood. The Lolita whose iliac crests had not yet flared, the Lolita that today I could touch and smell and hear and see, the Lolita of the strident voice and rich brown hair - of the bangs and the swirls and the sides and the curls at the back, and the sticky hot neck, and the vulgar vocabulary "revolting,” “super,” “luscious,” “goon,” “drip” - that Lolita, my Lolita, poor Catullus would lose forever. So how could I afford not to see her for two months of summer insomnias? Two whole months out of the two years of her remaining nymphage! Should I disguise myself as a somber old-fashioned girl, gawky Mlle Humbert, and put up my tent on the outskirts of Camp Q, in the hope that its russet nymphets would clamor: “Let us adopt that deep-voiced D. P.,” and drag the sad, shyly smiling Berthe au Grand Pied to their rustic hearth. Berthe will sleep with Dolores Haze!
Idle dry dreams. Two months of beauty, two months of tenderness, would be squandered forever, and I could do nothing about it, but nothing, mais rien. (1.15)
Humbert's constant companion, Rita compares herself to a god-damn mulberry moth. The adult mulberry silkworm moth (Bombyx mori) has a very short lifespan, typically living for only 3 to 10 days. In the same chapter of his Essais Montaigne quotes Aristotle (an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath, 384–322 BC) who says that there are small creatures on the river Hypanis that live only a day:
That which occurs only once cannot be a burden. Is it reasonable to fear for so long something which lasts only so little? Death makes living a long life and living a short life the same, for long and short is irrelevant to things that no longer are. Aristotle says that there are small creatures on the river Hypanis that live only a day. Those that die at eight in the morning die young; those that die at five in the evening die at a decrepit old age. Who among us would not find it laughable to consider the good or bad luck in this amount of time? Having more or less time in ours, when compared to eternity, or the lifespan of mountains, rivers, stars, trees, or even some animals, is no less ridiculous.
Nature leaves us no choice anyway. She says: “Leave this world as you entered it. The same transition you made from death to life, without restlessness or fear, make it again from life to death. Your death is one of the parts of the order of the universe, a part of the life of the world."
Inter se mortales mutua vivunt
Et, quasi cursores, vitai lampada tradunt.
[Mortals live together and, like runners, pass on the torch of life to one another. Lucretius, ii. 75, 78]
Vitai lampada (the torch of life) brings to mind Pushkin's fragment "V evreyskoy khizhine lampada... (In a Jewish hut the lamp palely burns in one corner," 1826), umirayushchaya lampada (the expiring lamp) mentioned by dying Bazarov at the end of Turgenev's novel Ottsy i deti ("Fathers and Sons," 1862) and John Ray, Jr.'s reading lamp:
“Lolita, or the Confession of a White Widowed Male,” such were the two titles under which the writer of the present note received the strange pages it preambulates. “Humbert Humbert,” their author, had died in legal captivity, of coronary thrombosis, on November 16, 1952, a few days before his trial was scheduled to start. His lawyer, my good friend and relation, Clarence Choate Clark, Esq., now of the District of Columbia bar, in asking me to edit the manuscript, based his request on a clause in his client’s will which empowered my eminent cousin to use the discretion in all matters pertaining to the preparation of “Lolita” for print. Mr. Clark’s decision may have been influenced by the fact that the editor of his choice had just been awarded the Poling Prize for a modest work (“Do the Senses make Sense?”) wherein certain morbid states and perversions had been discussed.
My task proved simpler than either of us had anticipated. Save for the correction of obvious solecisms and a careful suppression of a few tenacious details that despite “H. H.”‘s own efforts still subsisted in his text as signposts and tombstones (indicative of places or persons that taste would conceal and compassion spare), this remarkable memoir is presented intact. Its author’s bizarre cognomen is his own invention; and, of course, this mask - through which two hypnotic eyes seem to glow - had to remain unlifted in accordance with its wearer’s wish. While “Haze” only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname, her first name is too closely interwound with the inmost fiber of the book to allow one to alter it; nor (as the reader will perceive for himself) is there any practical necessity to do so. References to “H. H.”‘s crime may be looked up by the inquisitive in the daily papers for September-October 1952; its cause and purpose would have continued to remain a complete mystery, had not this memoir been permitted to come under my reading lamp.
According to John Ray, Jr., Mrs. “Richard F. Schiller” (Lolita's married name) outlived Humbert by forty days and died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest. But it seems that, actually, Lolita dies of ague on July 4, 1949, in the Elphinstone hospital. Everything what happens after her sudden death (Lolita's escape from the hospital, Humbert's affair with Rita, Lolita's marriage and pregnancy, and the murder of Clare Quilty) was invented by Humbert Humbert (whose "real" name is John Ray, Jr.). The author of the Foreword to Humbert's manuscript, John Ray, Jr. brings to mind Raymond Lully (a Mallorcan philosopher and poet who invented a philosophical system known as the Art, conceived as a type of universal logic to prove the truth of Christian doctrine to interlocutors of all faiths and nationalities, c. 1232-1316) and Raymond de Sabunde (a Catalan theologian and physician, c. 1385-1436). An Apology for Raymond Sabunde is an essay by Montaigne.