Awe

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The basin was filled with candy wrappers and paper napkins. Inside, behind padded doors each pierced by a grimy porthole, soared the dark splendors of the theater brushed here and there by the ushers’ traveling red flashlights or feebly, briefly dispelled by the glow of a match held to a forbidden cigarette. The ceiling had been designed to resemble the night sky, the stars were minute bulbs, the moon a yellow crescent. To either side of the screen was a windswept version of a royal box, a gilt throne on a small carpeted dais under a great blown-back stucco curtain topped by a papier-mâché coronet. When I finally held Helen Paper’s hand after sitting beside her for half an hour in the dark, I said to myself, “This hand could be insured for a million dollars.” She surrendered her hand to me, but was I really a likely candidate for it? Was this the way guys became popular? Did certain girls have the guts to tell everyone else, “Look, be nice to this guy. He’s not a nerd. He’s worth it. He’s special”? Or was this date merely some extraordinary favor wangled for me by Tommy, something that would not be repeated? Could it be (and I knew it could) that the Star Chamber of popularity was sealed and that no one would be admitted to it—no one except some casual new prince who belonged there? Tommy was a prince. He had a knack for demanding attention; even when he called the telephone operator for a number, he’d hold her in conversation. Once he even talked her into meeting him after work. The receptionists in offices downtown, salesladies in stores, the mothers of friends—all of them he sized up, mentally undressed, and though this appraisal might seem to be rude, in fact most women liked it. An efficient woman would be sailing past him. He’d grab her wrist. He’d apologize for the intrusion, but he’d also stand very close to her and his smile wouldn’t apologize for a thing. And she, at exactly the moment I would have expected outrage, would flush, her eyes would flutter, not in an experienced way but meltingly, since he’d touched a nerve, since he’d found a way to subvert the social into the sexual—and then she’d smile and rephrase what she was saying in a voice charmingly without conviction. After the movie we went somewhere for a snack and then I walked Helen home. Her beauty stood between us like an enemy, some sort of hereditary enemy I was supposed to fear, but I liked her well enough. Even the fiercest lovers must like each other at least once in a while.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I lowered my eyes but thought prayer sounded rather useless. I stood and thanked him. He walked me to the door and told me to come back. I wondered if he would pick me up into his arms, but he didn’t. I was small enough, but he didn’t. Instead he gave me his hand to shake, which I didn’t really like since I was uncertain about how to shake it. The gesture was also, I recognized, a way of treating me with respect as an independent young man. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted to be. This precocious role I took in the world was possible only because the world seemed so unreal, the stage transected by lights, its fourth wall missing in order to afford a view to thronged but shadowy spectators. Everything I did was being watched. If I turned right rather than left, someone took careful notice. If I repeated a magic phrase, the words were recorded and obeyed. Those spectators were certainly real, though I did not know them yet, but what they were watching, this dumb show in which I played such a decisive role—it was merely a simulacrum of actual feelings. These tears were paste. What was slowly dawning on me was my extreme importance, something the audience had long ago suspected. Who were they, these spectators? I’d look up into the evening sky to see them ranked in blowing white robes, the hems wet with blood. When I had a fever I could hear them. We moved to a city several hundred miles to the north and there we lived in a luxury hotel, sedate and respectable, a place with goldfish in a low marble pool in the lobby and a small velvet settee on the elevator. On the top floor a valet steamed and pressed clothes in a closet beside the double doors that opened onto a ballroom. The windows of the ballroom were heavily and perpetually draped and curtained, but I discovered a tiny door just two panes high that led out onto a narrow balcony. This balcony obviously was not intended to be used, just a strip of gravel over tar behind an escarpment of stone ornamental urns. In good weather I’d hide on this secret balcony and read; my favorite book was about the lost dauphin. On some days the ballroom was set up with long banquet tables bearing napery and floral arrangements between rows of gilt and velvet chairs. Other days the room would smell of stale cigarette smoke and the tables would have been stripped to their scarred wood tops and pipe-metal bases.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X V I IThe monster Geryon is described; and the Poets leave the rocky margin of the streamlet, and go down, on the right hand, to the place where he has landed himself. Virgil remains with him, and sends Dante, by himself alone (not without significance), to see the last class of sinners that are punished on the burning sand,—the Usurers who have done Violence to Nature and Art. (Canto xi.) They are sitting all crouched up, tears gushing from their eyes; and each of them has a Purse, stamped with armorial bearings, hanging from his neck. Dante looks into the faces of some; but finds it quite impossible to recognize any one of them. He briefly examines their condition, in the way of duty; listens to a few words that make him understand it completely; and then turns away without speaking at all to them. He goes back to his Guide; and Geryon conveys them down to the Eighth Circle. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] “BEHOLD THE savage beast with the pointed tail, that passes mountains, and breaks through walls and weapons; behold him that pollutes the whole world.” Thus began my Guide to speak to me; and beckoned him to come ashore, near the end of our rocky path; and that uncleanly image of Fraud came onward, and landed his head and bust, but drew not his tail upon the bank. His face was the face of a just man, so mild an aspect had it outwardly; and the rest was all a reptile’s body. He had two paws, hairy to the armpits; the back and the breast, and both the flanks, were painted with knots and circlets: never did Tartars or Turks make cloth with more colours, groundwork and broidery; nor by Arachne1 were such webs laid on her loom. As at times the wherries lie on shore, that are part in water and part on land; and as there amongst the guzzling Germans, the beaver2 adjusts himself to wage his war: so lay that worst of savage beasts upon the brim which closes the great sand with stone. In the void glanced all his tail, twisting upwards the venomed fork, which, as in scorpions, armed the point. My Guide said: “Now must we bend our way a little, to that wicked brute which couches there.” Then we descended on the right, and made ten paces towards the edge, that we might quite avoid the sand and flames; and when we came to him, I saw upon the sand, a little farther onwards, people sitting near the empty space. Here my Master said to me: “That thou mayest carry full experience of this round, go and see the state of these. Let thy talk with them be brief; till thou returnest, I will speak with this beast, that he may lend us his strong shoulders.”

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  When we were come to the temple, the great priest and those which were deputed to carrie the divine figures, but especially those which had long time bin worshippers of the religion, went into the secret chamber of the goddesse, where they put and placed the images according to their ordor. This done, one of the company which was a scribe or interpreter of letters, who in forme of a preacher stood up in a chaire before the place of the holy college, and began to reade out of a booke, and to interpret to the great prince, the senate, and to all the noble order of chivalry, and generally to all the Romane people, and to all such as be under the jurisdiction of Rome, these words following (Laois Aphesus) which signified the end of their divin service and that it was lawfull for every man to depart, whereat all the people gave a great showt, and replenished with much joy, bare all kind of hearbs and garlands of flowers home to their houses, kissing and imbracing the steps where the goddesse passed: howbeit I could not doe as the rest, for my mind would not suffer me to depart one foot away, so attentiv was I to behold the beauty of the goddesse, with remembrance of the great miserie I had endured.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  “May the grace that granteth me to confess me,” I began, “to the veteran fore-fighter, make my thought find expression!” And I followed on: “As wrote for us, O father, the veracious pen of thy dear brother, 5 who, with thee, set Rome on the good track; faith is the substance of things hoped for, and argument of things which are not seen; and this I take to be its quiddity.” 6 Then heard I: “Rightly dost thou deem, if well thou understandest wherefore he placed it amongst the substances, and then amongst the arguments.” 7 And I thereon: “The deep things which grant me here the largess to appear before me, are from the eyes of them below so hidden that their existence is there only in belief, whereon is built the lofty hope; and so of substance it embraceth the intention; 8 and from this belief needs must we syllogize without further sight; therefore it includes the intention of argument.” Then heard I: “If all that is acquired down below by teaching were so understood, there were no room left for the wit of sophist.” Thus was breathed forth from that enkindled love; then did it add: “Right well hath now been traversed this coin’s alloy and weight; but tell me if thou hast it in thy purse.” Whereupon I: “Yea, so bright and round I have it that for me is no perhaps in its impression.” Then issued from the deep light that was glowing there: “This dear gem on which all virtue is up-budt, whence came it to thee?” And I: “The ample shower of the Holy Spirit which is poured over the old and over the new parchments, is syllogism that hath brought it to so sharp conclusion for me, that, compared to it, all demonstration seemeth blunt to me.” Then heard I: “That old and that new proposition which bringeth thee to such conclusion, 9 wherefore dost hold it for divine discourse?” And I: “The proof which doth unfold the truth to me lieth in the works that followed, for which nature ne’er heated iron yet, nor hammered anvil.” The answer came to me: “Say, who assureth thee that these works were? The very script that would attest itself, no other, sweareth it to

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  says to Mason, Thank you for our Gaby. There’s not a dry eye in the house. After the presentation to Mason it feels as if the program is over. People stand and begin to say goodbye to one another, when the doors swing open and Natalie makes her entrance, swooping in like a high-fashion gypsy, the “Queen of New Age,” as she’s known, her Santa Fe jewelry jangling on her wrists and around her neck. A buzz goes through the crowd and people take their seats again. After all, she’s Natalie Renso. She’s famous. You can see her on TV, at readings and book signings, in fashion magazines. Most people don’t know Renso is Osner spelled backward, the kind of code name children come up with in third grade. But it’s worked well for Natalie. She steps up to the podium, waits for the whispering to die down and begins. “It was the winter that changed our lives,” she says. “The winter we learned who we were, and what we were made of.” And that’s it. She doesn’t say a word about Ruby. Just that she’ll be happy to sign books—please write the name of the person you’d like her to sign for on a Post-it. Even Lee Patterson, daughter of the Secretary of War, lines up to get her signature. “My daughter would never forgive me if I didn’t bring her a signed book.” Miri does not get in line. She hangs back. “Did you really sleep with Warren Beatty?” someone asks Natalie. “Why not?” Natalie answers. “Everyone who had the chance did.” She laughs, and the crowd laughs with her. — CHRISTINA DOESN’T LIKE whatever’s going on between Miri and Mason. You’d have to be an idiot to miss it. The two of them making goo-goo eyes at each other all through lunch. Jack tells her to let it be, they’re adults, they’re not going to do anything stupid, anything that would mess up their lives. Instead, she tries to convince Miri to fly home with her and Jack today. The plane is waiting at Teterboro. But Miri says she’s staying another night. “Fine,” Christina says. “I’ll stay and fly back commercial with you tomorrow.” Miri looks at her. “No.” “No? What do you mean, no?” “I mean that’s crazy. Fly back with Jack and I’ll see you day after tomorrow. I

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Although Lolita is less dramatically anti-realistic than Pale Fire, in its own way it is as grandly labyrinthine and as much a work of artifice as that more ostentatiously tricky novel. This is not immediately apparent because Humbert is Nabokov’s most “humanized” character since Luzhin (1930), and Lolita the first novel since the early thirties in which “the end” remains intact. Moreover, Nabokov said that The Enchanter, the 1939 story containing the central idea of Lolita, went unpublished not because of its subject matter but rather because “The little girl wasn’t alive. She hardly spoke. Little by little I managed to give her some semblance of reality.” It may seem anomalous for puppeteer Nabokov, creator of the sham worlds of Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister, to worry this way about “reality” (with or without quotation marks); yet one extreme does not preclude the other in Nabokov, and the originality of Lolita derives from this very paradox. The puppet theater never collapses, but everywhere there are fissures, if not gaps, in the structure, crisscrossing in intricate patterns and visible to the discerning eye—that is, the eye trained on Nabokov fictions and thus accustomed to novelistic trompe-l’oeil. Lolita is a great novel to the same extent as Nabokov is able to have it both ways, involving the reader on the one hand in a deeply moving yet outrageously comic story, rich in verisimilitude, and on the other engaging him in a game made possible by the interlacings of verbal figurations which undermine the novel’s realistic base and distance the reader from its dappled surface, which then assumes the aspect of a gameboard (the figurations are detailed in the Notes). As a lecturer, Nabokov was a considerable Thespian, able to manipulate audiences in a similar manner. His rehearsal of Gogol’s death agonies remains in one’s mind: how the hack doctors alternately bled him and purged him and plunged him into icy baths, Gogol so frail that his spine could be felt through his stomach, the six fat white bloodletting leeches clinging to his nose, Gogol begging to have them removed—“Please lift them, lift them, keep them away!”— and, sinking behind the lectern, now a tub, Nabokov for several moments was Gogol, shuddering and shivering, his hands held down by a husky attendant, his head thrown back in pain and terror, nostrils distended, eyes shut, his beseechments filling the large lecture hall. Even the sea of C-minuses in the back of the room could not help being moved. And then, after a pause, Nabokov would very quietly say, in a sentence taken word-for-word from his Gogol, “Although the scene is unpleasant and has a human appeal which I deplore, it is necessary to dwell upon it a little longer in order to bring out the curiously physical side of Gogol’s genius.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  For as the Sun in sight that most trembleth, so the remembrance of the sweet smile sheareth my memory of its very self. From the first day when in this life I saw her face, until this sight, my song hath ne’er been cut off from the track; but now needs must my tracking cease from following her beauty further forth in poesy, as at his utmost reach must every artist. Such as I leave her for a mightier proclamation than of my trumpet, which draweth its arduous subject to a close, with alert leader’s voice and gesture, did she again begin: “We have issued forth from the greatest body into the heaven which is pure light, light intellectual full-charged with love, love of true good full-charged with gladness, gladness which transcendeth every sweetness. Here shalt thou see the one and the other soldiery of Paradise, 1 and the one in those aspects which thou shalt see at the last judgment.” As a sudden flash of lightning which so shattereth the visual spirits as to rob the eye of power to realize e’en strongest objects; so there shone around me a living light, leaving me swathed in such a web of its glow that naught appeared to me. “Ever doth the love which stilleth heaven, receive into itself with such like salutation, duly to fit the taper for its flame.” So soon as these brief words came into me I felt me to surmount my proper power; and kindled me with such new-given sight that there is no such brightness unalloyed that mine eyes might not hold their own with it. And I saw a light, in river form, glow tawny betwixt banks painted with marvellous spring. From out this river issued living sparks, and dropped on every side into the blossoms, like rubies set in gold. Then as inebriated with the odours they plunged themselves again into the marvellous swirl, and as one entered issued forth another. “The lofty wish that now doth burn and press thee to have more knowledge of the things thou seest, pleaseth me more the more it swelleth. But of this water needs thou first must drink, ere so great thirst in thee be slaked.” So spoke mine eyes’ sun unto me; then added: “The river and the topaz-gems that enter and go forth, and the smiling of the grasses are the shadowy prefaces of their reality. Not that such things are harsh as in themselves; but on thy side is the defect, in that thy sight not yet exalteth it so high.” 2 Never doth child so sudden rush with face turned to the milk, if he awake far later than his wont, as then did I, to make yet better mirrors of mine eyes, down bending to the wave which floweth that we may better us. And no sooner drank of it mine eye-lids’ rim than into roundness seemed to change its length.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  Thus by her sorcery she transformed her body into what shape she would, which when I saw I was greatly astonished, and although I was enchanted by no kind of charm, yet I thought I seemed not to have the likeness of Lucius, for so was I vanished from my senses, amazed in madness, that I dreamed waking, and felt mine eyes to know whether I were asleep or no. But when I was come again to myself, I took Fotis by the hand, and moved it to mine eyes, and said: “I pray thee, while occasion doth serve, that I may have the fruition of the fruits of thy love towards me, and grant me some of this oint- ment. O Fotis, my honey, I pray thee by thy sweet breasts, and I will ever hereafter be bound unto you by amighty gift and obedient to your commandment, if you will but make that I may be turned into a bird, and stand, like Cupid with his wings, beside you my Venus.” Then said Fotis: “ Will you go about to deceive me now, my love, like a fox, and enforce me to work mine own sorrow?! Do hardly now save you, that are without defence, from these she-wolves of Thessaly, and then if you be a bird where shall I seek you? And when shall I see you ?" Then answered I: “God forbid that I should commit such a crime, for though I could fly into the air as an eagle, or though I were the sure messenger or joyful armour-bearer of Jupiter, yet would I have recourse to nest with thee for all that glory of wings: and I swear by the knot of thy amiable hair, that wherewith you have fast bound my spirit, I love not any other person rather than Fotis. Moreover, this cometh to my mind, that if by virtue of the ointment 1 Lit. “to apply the axe to my own legs.” : 133 LUCIUS APULEIUS semel avem talem perunctus induero, domus omnes procul me vitare debere: quam pulchro enim quam- que festivo matronae perfruentur amatore bubone ! Quid, quod istas nocturnas aves, cum penetraverint Larem quempiam, sollicite prehensas foribus videmus affigi ut, quod infaustis volatibus familiae minantur exitium, suis luant cruciatibus? Sed, quod sciscitari paene praeterivi, quo dicto factove rursum exutis pinnulis illis ad meum redibo Lucium?" * Bono animo es quod ad huius rei curam pertinet" ait. * Nam mihi domina singula monstravit, quae possunt rursus in facies hominum tales figuras reformare : nec istud factum putes ulla benivolentia, sed ut ei re- deunti medela salubri possem subsistere. ^ Specta denique quam parvis quamque futilibus tanta res pro- curetur herbulis: anethi modicum cum lauri foliis im- missum rore fontano datur lavacrum et poculum." 24 Haec identidem asseverans summa cum trepida-

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The ruler was an empress—isolated and superb—and she wandered sleeplessly through miles of gray, dilapidated corridors. You see, something new with a mansard roof had been provided for her, but she felt herself drawn instead to the much older rooms that lay behind and beyond, the low-ceilinged rooms lit by icon candles and filled with smoke in which such terrible things had been done, in which history had been born or butchered. Half-numb with the cold, my fingers and toes burning, my nose running and eyes tearing, I hovered over my dingy kremlin for yet another half hour although the light was failing and a stray dog had just yellowed the coronation chapel. The tuppity-tuppity-tuppity of snow chains on passing car tires was the only sound in the evening air. Blooms of mild radiance suddenly opened within the glass globes of street-lamps. Headlights coming around the curve transected me, so crystalline had I become, a transparence dancing attendance on my imperial insomniac. She penetrated farther and farther into the unmapped mysteries of her palace; tuppity, tuppity; she pushed aside a leather curtain, entered the surprisingly small old throne room. There on a raised chair sat a skeleton, bracelets like manacles on its wrists and a gold hat eating its way into the tiny brown skull. I was three people: the boy who smelled bad when I was with my sister; the boy who was wise and kind beyond his years when I was with my mother; but when I was alone not a boy at all but a principle of power, of absolute power. FOUR Like a blind man’s hands exploring a face, the memory lingers over an identifying or beloved feature but dismisses the rest as just a curve, a bump, an expanse. Only this feature—these lashes tickling the palm like a firefly or this breath pulsing hot on a knuckle or this vibrating Adam’s apple—only this feature seems lovable, sexy. But in writing one draws in the rest, the forgotten parts. One even composes one’s improvisations into a quite new face never glimpsed before, the likeness of an invention. Busoni once said he prized the most those empty passages composers make up to get from one “good part” to another. He said such workmanlike but minor transitions reveal more about a composer—the actual vernacular of his imagination—than the deliberately bravura moments. I say all this by way of hoping that the lies I’ve made up to get from one poor truth to another may mean something—may even mean something most particular to you, my eccentric, patient, scrupulous reader, willing to make so much of so little, more patient and more respectful of life, of a life, than the author you’re allowing for a moment to exist yet again.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  And by and by, there approached a faire and comely mayden, not much unlike to Juno, for she had a Diademe of gold upon her head, and in her hand she bare a regall scepter: then followed another resembling Pallas, for she had on her head a shining sallet, whereon was bound a garland of Olive branches, having in one hand a target or shield: and in the other a speare as though she would fight: then came another which passed the other in beauty, and presented the Goddesse Venus, with the color of Ambrosia, when she was a maiden, and to the end she would shew her perfect beauty, shee appeared all naked, saving that her fine and dainty skin was covered with a thin smocke, which the wind blew hither and thither to testifie the youth and flowre of the age of the dame. Her colour was of two sorts, for her body was white as descended from heaven, and her smocke was blewish, as arrived from the sea: After every one of the Virgins which seemed goddesses, followed certaine waiting servants, Castor and Pollus went behind Juno, having on their heads helmets covered with starres. This Virgin Juno sounded a Flute, which shee bare in her hand, and mooved her selfe towards the shepheard Paris, shewing by honest signes and tokens, and promising that hee should be Lord of all Asia, if hee would judge her the fairest of the three, and to give her the apple of gold: the other maiden which seemed by her armour to be Pallas, was accompanied with two young men armed, and brandishing their naked swords in their hands, whereof one named Terror, and the other Feare; behind them approached one sounding his trumpet to provoke and stirre men to battell; this maiden began to dance and shake her head, throwing her fierce and terrible eyes upon Paris and promising that if it pleased him to give her the victory of beauty, shee would make him the most strong and victorious man alive. Then came Venus and presented her selfe in the middle of the Theater, with much favour of all the people, for shee was accompanied with a great many of youth, whereby you would have judged them all to be Cupidoes, either to have flowne from heaven or else from the river of the sea, for they had wings, arrowes, and the residue of their habit according in each point, and they bare in their hands torches lighted, as though it had beene a day of marriage.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Down by the steps of the sacred ladder I so far descended only to do thee joyance with speech and with the light which mantleth me; nor was it greater love that made me swifter; for more and so much love up there doth burn, as the flashing maketh plain to thee; but the deep love which holdeth us prompt servants of the counsel which governeth the world, maketh assignment here as thou observest.” “Yea, I perceive, O sacred lamp,” said I, “how free love in this court sufficeth to make follow the eternal providence; but this it is, which seemeth me hard to discern: Wherefore thou alone amongst thy consorts wast predestined to this office.” Nor had I come to the last word, ere the light made his mid point a centre, and whirled himself like to a swift millstone. Then answered the love that was therein: “The divine light doth focus it on me, piercing into that wherein I am embowelled; 4 the power whereof, conjoined unto mv sight, upiifteth me above myself so far that I perceive the supreme essence 5 whence it is milked. Thence cometh the joy wherewith I flame; for to my sight, even as it is clear, the brightness of the flame do I equate. 6 But that soul in heaven which is most illuminated, that Seraph who hath his eye most fixed on God, had given no satisfaction to thy question; because so far within the abyss of the eternal statute lieth the thing thou askest, that from all created vision it is cut off. And to the mortal world, when thou returnest, take this report, that it presume not more to move its feet to-ward so great a goal.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X X I I I The final goal of divine Providence, the mysteries of the incarnation and the redemption, the contrast between earthly hope and heavenly fruition, the whole order of the spiritual universe epitomized in the Poet’s journey, the crowning grace still awaiting him, the need of jet father purging away of mortal dross if he is to receive it, the high obligation that will rest upon his life hereafter, the sustaining grace that will be needed to enable him to meet it by keeping his affections true to so great a vision, and the intense sympathy with which all the saints enter into his aspiration and plead for the fulfilment of the utmost grace to him as a part of their own bliss,—all this, with the praises of the Virgin, etherialized into the very perfume of devotion, rises in Bernard’s prayer to Mary. Mary answers the prayer by looking into the light of God, thereby to gain Bernard’s petition for Dante; and Dante, anticipating Bernard’s permission, with the passion of his longing already assuaged by the peace of now assured fruition, looks right into the deep light. Memory cannot hold the experience that then was his, though it retains the sweetness that was born of it. But as he gropes for the recovery of some fragment of his vision, he feels in the throb cf an ampler joy the assurance that he is touching on the truth as he records his belief that he saw the whole essence of the universe, all beings and all their attributes and all their relations, no longer as scattered and imperfect fragments, but as one perfect whole, and that whole naught else than one single flame of love. So keen is the light of that flame that it would shrivel up the sight if it should turn aside. But that may not be, since good, which is the object of all volition, is whole and perfect in it, and only fragmentary and imperfect away from it, so that a free will cannot by its nature turn away; and the sight is ever strengthened that turns right into it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  had fallen in love for his whole life, holding them in his memory as if under a magnifying glass, and experiencing them so intensely that twenty years later, when he read them over again, he saw only a dryish paraphrase, an abridged edition, as if they had been outdistanced by the unrepeatable, immortal image that he had retained. But it was not a thirst for distant peregrinations that forced him to follow on the heels of Phileas Fogg, nor was it a boyish inclination for mysterious adventures that drew him to that house on Baker Street, where the lanky detective with the hawk profile, having given himself an injection of cocaine, would dreamily play the violin. Only much later did he clarify in his own mind what it was that had thrilled him so about these two books; it was that exact and relentlessly unfolding pattern: Phileas, the dummy in the top hat, wending his complex elegant way with its justifiable sacrifices, now on an elephant bought for a million, now on a ship of which half has to be burned for fuel; and Sherlock endowing logic with the glamour of a daydream, Sherlock composing a monograph on the ash of all known sorts of cigars and with this ash as with a talisman progressing through a crystal labyrinth of possible deductions to the one radiant conclusion. [pp. 33–34] For more on Holmes, see Shirley Holmes. valetudinarian: a person having a sick or weakly constitution. visited with his uncle … Mother’s club: see 4640 Roosevelt Blvd.… mattress. sidetrack … female: see Some old woman. frileux: chilly; susceptible of cold. Florentine: Botticelli’s Venus (here). French … Dorset yokel … Austrian tailor: the “salad of racial genes” mentioned here, where a Swiss and “Danubian” dash is added. “I have carefully kept Russians out of it,” noted Nabokov, “though I think his first wife had some Russian blood mixed with Polish.” Similarly, there are very few specific allusions to Russian writers in Lolita. beast’s lair: Quilty. Viennese medicine man: Freud. See a case history. hypnotoid: a variant of “hypnoid,” of or pertaining to hypnosis. Streng verboten: German; strictly forbidden. like her mother: “Lolita’s smoking manners were those of her mother,” emphasized Nabokov. “I remember being very pleased with that little vision when composing it.” Cue: Quilty’s nickname; see “Vivian Darkbloom”. Curious coincidence: “Camp Q.” It’s no “coincidence” at all; someone in the know has planned it this way.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The father of a classmate was a local psychiatrist and he arranged for me to see a famous analyst John Thomas O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s office was next door to his home, the two buildings unassuming suburban clapboard houses separated by a concrete drive. Once I was inside the office, however, I found the decor to be luxurious and exotic, not at all what I had expected. The waiting room was carpeted in delicate tatami mats bruised by horrid Western shoes. A large birdcage, woven out of bent reeds to resemble a baroque Brazilian church, confined a dozen bright choristers all cheeping at once. Long scrolls, rubbings from Han Dynasty tombs, pictured featureless warriors standing in tall, narrow chariots under stiff fans and drawn along by surprisingly small ponies twisting nervously in their traces—a whole traffic jam of military chariots describing interlocking curves, fan beside palmetto fan, one horse’s neck dipping behind and below another’s raised hoof. The artist had been at least as interested in the abstract pattern as in the subject and as a consequence had turned a dusty pandemonium into immaculate machinery. I studied these details because I had so long to wait (I’d arrived early and the doctor was running about an hour behind schedule). At last he emerged with a red-nosed woman in a green dress who was humble, even cringing. She slipped into a full-length black coat made of the wool of unborn lambs; once she’d extinguished the color of her dress she regained her composure and accomplished an unsniveling exit. Dr. O’Reilly smiled at me, teeth spaced and white, lips full and raw, gnawed raw, it seemed, under full mustaches, his hair white and to his shoulders—a startling length in those days. His costume also gave one pause: a piece of rope to hold up baggy, stained trousers, bare feet in hemp sandals, a great tent of a minutely and intermittently pleated lime-green Havana shirt containing his corpulence, and in the stubby fingers of his right hand a dirty hanky he kept pressing to his red, raw face, for though we were still in midwinter, sweat lent an incongruous dazzle to his face.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Scott squatted heavily on this piece of furniture, her chin on her palm, as though she were Death meditating on its latest convert. Sometimes I’d want just to fly through, to kiss Tim or to leave my Latin assignment with her husband, but she couldn’t be ignored. She drank in all the oxygen around her and reversed the magnetism of all metals; one was drawn to her even by the fillings in one’s teeth. Her hair was black and dirty and cut into a pageboy only because hair must be worn in some style; undoubtedly she would have preferred it thick with twigs and matted with mud. She always wore a formless madras blouse flown like a flag announcing defeat over the battlements of her corpulent body. Her teeth overlapped. Her eyeteeth were unusually long and pointed and wet. Mrs. Scott was a poet. Her husband also wrote verse. It was understood between them that his lines were very learned but a bit dry and completely the work of the conscious mind, hence inferior. He was of the school of T. S. Eliot—classic, ironic, religious. Her poems, which appeared seldom but then cataclysmically after a night white with lightning, had been purloined from the danker, more sulfurous regions of the unconscious. She spoke with the lentor of alligators through skeins of Spanish moss white and frangible with death; epochs of prehistory bubbled voluptuously and broke with gluey smackings in the lower regions of her sinister art. On the day after one of her nights of vision I’d find her panting with fatigue on the couch, her eyes ringed in black, her smile slightly goofy with sanctity, a reminder that silly once meant “blessed.” I stood in front of the cobra throne, her couch, and said, “I understand from Mr. Scott that you’ve written a wonderful poem.” “Wonderful?” she asked, aghast, chuckling silently, her many teeth various beiges, yellows and browns, even the odd blue. “Did he say wonderful?” By now her body was heaving under the madras blouse with horrific scorn. “Well, I don’t mean to get him into trouble,” I said nervously. “That’s probably not the word he used; I just gathered that he’s crazy about your new poem.” The terrible silent chuckle continued behind clouds of smoke. The Cumaean Sybil swayed hysterically over the tripod. “Do you think I might hear it sometime?” I asked, my question unexpectedly sounding rude and trivial to my own ears. “Don’t make me read it today,” she begged. “Not today.” It seemed her energies, mortal after all, had already been taxed to the limit by creation. “Of course,” I hastened to assure her. “Help me up,” she said. I rushed to assist her. I took her hand and pulled. When she was at last standing beside me, breathing audibly, she let her eyes travel up and down my body in a surprisingly frank way. Then she scuttled off to the kitchen.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Then to the eternal light they bent themselves, wherein we may not ween that any creature’s eye findeth its way so clear. 3 And I, who to the goal of all my longings was drawing nigh, even as was meet the ardour of the yearning quenched within me. Bernard gave me the sign and smiled to me that I should look on high, but I already of myself was such as he would have me; 4 because my sight, becoming purged, now more and more was entering through the ray of the deep light which in itself is true. Thence forward was my vision mightier than our discourse, which faileth at such sight, and faileth memory at so great outrage. As is he who dreaming seeth, and when the dream is gone the passion stamped remaineth, and nought else Cometh to the mind again; even such am I; for almost wholly faileth me my vision, yet doth the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart. So doth the snow unstamp it to the sun, so to the wind on the light leaves was lost the Sybil’s wisdom. 5 O light supreme who so far dost uplift thee o’er mortal thoughts, re-lend unto my mind a little or what then thou didst seem, and give my tongue such power that it may leave only a single sparkle of thy glory unto the folk to come; for by returning to my memory somewhat, and by a little sounding in these verses, more of thy victory will be conceived. I hold that by the keenness of the living ray which I endured I had been lost, had mine eyes turned aside from it. And so I was the bolder, as I mind me, so long to sustain it as to unite my glance with the Worth infinite. O grace abounding, wherein I presumed to fix my look on the eternal light so long that I consumed my sight thereon! Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one volume, the scattered leaves of all the universe; substance and accidents and their relations, 6 as though together fused, after such fashion that what I tell of is one simple flame. The universal form of this complex 7 I think that I beheld, because more largely, as I say this, I feel that I rejoice. A single moment maketh a deeper lethargy for me than twenty and five centuries have wrought on the emprise that erst threw Neptune in amaze at Argo’s shadow. 8 Thus all suspended did my mind gaze fixed, immovable, intent, ever enkindled by its gazing. Such at that light doth man become that to turn thence to any other sight could not by possibility be ever yielded.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Father Burke, clearly intelligent, erudite and dedicated, thrilled them when he insisted on the literal miracle of the Virgin Birth and the actual existence of hell, although in his version hell got improved, its status as fiery real estate changed to a cold, unreal state in which the degree of damnation is measured by the soul’s distance from God. “Hell is God’s absence,” he told me. For Thanksgiving Mrs. Scott had on an unprecedentedly girlish blue dress and a mauve ribbon bobby-pinned to her still-wet hair. She kept blinking mildly and smiling meekly as she brought in dish after dish to the heavy oak dining room table. DeQuincey stood to carve. He performed the ritual with solemnity. When we toasted one another with red wine, DeQuincey said to Father Burke, “I welcome you to the hospitality of our table; you are our honored guest,” and the priest smiled and inclined his head. I kept feeling that everyone but me was following a secret book of etiquette and that the deliberateness of the courtesy was as medieval as Burke’s theology. The dinner conversation was philosophical. Aristotle was dismissed in favor of Plato, a preference I again ascribed to the very improbability of Plato’s thought. It seemed that the more bizarre a belief, the more poetic it must be, and hence the more noble it was to embrace it. I couldn’t help sensing that the Scotts were, underneath everything, as American as I, just as skeptical of ideas, and that like me they were convinced by the sincerity of an impulse rather than the rigor of a system. Very well. By a snobbish reverse, the preposterous claims of Platonism and a Platonic Christianity were what most excited them, as though anything that so taxed one’s credulity must be—well, not true, but aristocratic, superior. When they’d talk about Original Sin or the Creation or the Devil they’d become agitated, their cheeks would flush and their eyes would sparkle, as though they were hypnotizing themselves into espousing this obvious nonsense. And the more vague and absurd the things they discussed (angels, the resurrection of the body), the more they used such words as precisely, undoubtedly, clearly and naturally , and each time they uttered such a word their eyes would dilate with glee—lying made them gleeful, just as children shriek with pleasure as they egg each other on to think up more and more gruesome details in a ghost story. After dinner I found myself alone with Father Burke. Tim was taking his nap and the Scotts had rather stagily gone out for a walk. The priest was by no means the dour figure I had pictured him to be. He was small, clubby, wore a gold seal ring, swilled his brandy in a snifter and inhaled its fumes with his eyes closed and eyebrows raised as though he were hearing a tenor float a high note.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The leaves wherewith all the garden of the eternal Gardener is leafed, I love in measure of the good that hath been proffered to them from him.” Soon as I held my peace a sweetest song rang through the Heaven, and my Lady with the rest cried: “Holy, Holy, Holy!” And as at a keen light one wakeneth from slumber by reason of the vessel spirit which runneth to meet the glow that pierceth tunic after tunic, 8 and he thus awakened confoundeth what he seeth, so undiscerning his sudden vigil until reflection cometh to its succour; so from mine eyes did Beatrice dissipate every scale with the ray of hers that might cast their glow more than a thousand miles; whence better than before I saw thereafter, and as one stupefied, made question as to a fourth light which I perceived with us. And my Lady: “Within those rays holdeth amorous converse with its maker the first soul that the first Power s’er created.” As the spray which bendeth down its head as the wind passeth over, and doth then uplift itself by its own power which doth raise it up, did I, whilst she was speaking, all bemazed; and then was reassured by a desire to speak, wherewith I was a-burning; and I began: “O fruit, who wast alone produced mature, O ancient father who hast both daughter and daughter-in-law in every bride; devoutly as I may do I implore thee that thou speak to me; thou seest my will, and to hear thee the sooner I not utter it.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  But there appeared to me a sight which so straitly held me to itself, to look upon it, that I bethought me not of my confession. In such guise as, from glasses transparent and polished, or from waters clear and tranquil, not so deep that the bottom is darkened, come back the notes of our faces, so faint that a pearl on a white brow cometh not slowlier upon our pupils; so did I behold many a countenance, eager to speak, wherefore I fell into the counter error of that which kindled love between the man and fountain.1 No sooner was I aware of them, than, thinking them reflected images, I turned round my eyes to see of whom they were; and I saw naught, and turned them forward again straight on the light of my sweet guide, whose sacred eyes glowed as she smiled. “Wonder not that I smile,” she said, “in presence of thy child-like thought, since it trusts not its foot upon the truth, but turneth thee after its wont, to vacancy. True substances2 are they which thou beholdest, relegated here for failure of their vows. Wherefore speak with them, and listen and believe; for the true light which satisfieth them, suffereth them not to turn their feet aside from it.” And I to the shade who seemed most to long for converse turned me and began, as one whom too great longing doth confound: “O well-created spirit, who in the rays of eternal life dost feel the sweetness which, save tasted, may ne’er be understood; it were acceptable to me, wouldst thou content me with thy name and with your lot.”3 Whereat she, eager and with smiling eyes: “Our love doth no more bar the gate to a just wish, than doth that love which would have all its court like to itself. In the world I was a virgin sister; and if thy memory be rightly searched, my greater beauty will not hide me from thee, but thou wilt know me again for Piccarda,4 who, placed here with these other blessed ones, am blessed in the sphere that moveth slowest.5 Our affections, which are aflame only in the pleasure of the Holy Spirit, rejoice to be informed after his order.6 And this lot, which seemeth so far down, therefore is given us because our vows were slighted, and on some certain side were not filled in.” Whereon I to her: “In your wondrous aspects a divine somewhat regloweth that doth transmute you from conceits of former times. Wherefore I lagged in calling thee to mind; now what thou tellest me giveth such help that more articulately I retrace thee. But tell me, ye whose blessedness is here, do you desire a more lofty place, to see more, or to make yourselves more dear?” With those other shades first she smiled a little, then answered me so joyous that she seemed to burn in love’s first flame: