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 Fear of Flying (1973)

  I’d climb the slippery steps for a view of the city—and there it would be: the gleaming river, the dappled woods, the pinkish hulk of the castle. Why did chroniclers of the Third Reich say everything about Germany except that it was beautiful? Was that too morally ambiguous? The beauty of the countryside and the ugliness of the people. Couldn’t we cope with such irony? Descending from the tower, I’d walk deeper into the woods past a small restaurant called Waldschenke (or, forest tavern) which featured fat-bottomed burghers drinking beer outside in summer, mulled wine inside in winter. There I had to leave the car and continue up through the forest (leaves crunching underfoot, pines drooping overhead, sun obliterated by foliage). Since the tiers of seats were cut into the hillside, the entrance to the amphitheater was from above. Suddenly the theater gaped beneath you—row after row of weedy seats, littered with bottle glass, condoms, candy wrappers. At the base was an apron stage flanked by flagpoles for the swastika or the German Eagle. And on either side were entrances for speakers to appear surrounded by brown-shirted bodyguards. But the most astonishing part was the setting: a gigantic pine-rimmed bowl nestled in the unearthly quiet of those fairy-tale woods. The ground was sacred. Odin had been worshipped, then Christ, then Hitler. I would dash down the hill over the tiers of seats and stand in the dead center of the stage reciting my own poetry to an audience of echoes. One day I told Horst that I wanted to write about the amphitheater. “Why?” he asked. “Because everyone pretends it isn’t there.” “Do you think that’s enough of a reason?” “Yes.” I went to the Heidelberg main library and began looking through guidebooks. Most of them were routine, with glossy photos of the Schloss and old engravings of the pasty-faced Electors of the Palatinate. Finally I came across a library-bound one, English and German on facing pages, with cheap, yellowing paper, black and white photographs and old Gothic type. The publication date was 1937, and every ten pages or so a paragraph or a photo or a small block of type was covered over with a square of oak-tag.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  thou shalt see me come to thy chosen tree and crown me, then, with the leaves of which the matter and thou shalt make me worthy. So few times, Father, is there gathered of it, for triumph or of Cæsar or of poet,—fault and shame of human wills,— that the Peneian frond5 should bring forth gladness in the joyous Delphic deity, when it sets any athirst for itself. A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark; perchance, after me, shall prayer with better voices be so offered that Cirrha6 may respond. The lantern of the universe riseth unto mortals through divers straits; but from that which joineth four circles in three crosses7 he issueth with more propitious course, and united with a more propitious star, and doth temper and stamp the mundane wax more after his own mood. Almost this strait had made morning8 on that side and evening on this; and there that hemisphere all was aglow, and the other region darkling; when I beheld Beatrice turned on her left side and gazing on the sun. Never did eagle so fix himself thereon. And even as the second ray doth ever issue from the first, and rise back upward, (like as a pilgrim whose will is to return); so from her gesture, poured through the eyes into my imagination, did mine own take shape; and I fixed mine eyes upon the sun, transcending our wont.9 Much is granted there which is not granted here to our powers, in virtue of the place made as proper to the human race.10 I not long endured him, nor yet so little but that I saw him sparkle all around, like iron issuing molten from the furnace. And, of a sudden, meseemed that day was added unto day, as though he who hath the power, had adorned heaven with a second sun.11 Beatrice was standing with her eyes all fixed upon the eternal wheels,12 and I fixed my sight, removed from there above, on her. Gazing on her such I became within, as was Glaucus,13 tasting of the grass that made him the sea-fellow of the other gods. To pass beyond humanity may not be told in words, wherefore let the example satisfy him for whom grace reserveth the experience. If I was only that of me which thou didst new-create,14 O Love who rulest heaven, thou knowest, who with thy light didst lift me up. When the wheel which thou, by being longed for, makest eternal,15 drew unto itself my mind with the harmony which thou dost temper and distinguish, so much of heaven then seemed to me enkindled with the sun’s flame, that rain nor river ever made a lake so wide distended.16 The newness of the sound17 and the great light kindled in me a longing for their cause, ne’er felt before so keenly. Whence she who saw me even as I saw myself, to still my agitated mind, opened her lips, e’er I mine to ask;

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  so within the lights the sacred creatures flying sang, and in their shapings made themselves now D, now I, now L. First singing to their note they moved, then as they made themselves one of these signs, a little space would stay and hold their peace. O goddess Pegasæan,5 who givest glory unto genius, and renderest it long life, as with thy aid doth it to cities and to realms, make me bright with thyself, that I may throw into relief their figures as I have them in conception; let thy might show in these brief verses. They displayed them then in five times seven vowels and consonants, and I took note of the members, even as they appeared in utterance to me. Diligite justitiam, were the first verb and substantive of all the picturing; qui judicatis terram were the last.6 Then ordered in the M7 of the fifth word they stayed, so that Jove seemed silver in that place, pricked out with gold; and I saw descending other lights where was the M’s peak, and there still them; singing, I take it, the good that moveth them unto himself. Then, as at the smiting of burnt brands there rise innumerable sparks, wherefrom the foolish ones use to draw augury,8 meseemed there rose thence more than thousand lights, and mounted some much, some little, even as the sun which kindleth them, ordained them; and when each one had stilled it in its place, an eagle’s head and neck I saw presented by that pricked-out fire. He who there painteth hath not one to guide him, but he himself doth guide, and from him cometh to the mind that power which is form unto the nests;9 the other blessedness,10 which at first seemed content to twine the M with lilies, by a slight motion followed the imprint. O sweet star, what quality and magnitude of gems made plain to me that our justice is the effect of the heaven thou dost engem! Wherefore I pray the mind wherein thy motion and thy power hath beginning, to look upon the place whence issueth the smoke chat vitiates thy ray; so that once more the wrath be kindled against the buying and the selling in the temple which made its walls of miracles and martyrdoms.11 O soldiery of heaven, whom I look upon, pray for them who have all gone astray on earth, following the ill example. Erst ’twas the wont to make war with swords; now it is made by withholding, now here, now there, the bread the tender father bars from none; but thou, who but to cancel,12 dost record, reflect that Peter and Paul who died for the vineyard thou layest waste, are living yet. Though thou indeed mayst urge: “I have so fixed my longing on him who lived a solitary, and by tripping steps was drawn to martyrdom, that I know not the fisherman nor Paul.”

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O V I IIn significant connection with the Empire comes the treatment of the Redcmption, the chief theological discourse in the Paradiso. Justinian and the other spirits vanish with hymns of triumph. Dante would fain ask a question, but when he raises his head to speak, he is overcome by awe, and bends it down again. Beatrice reads his thoughts, and bids him give good heed to her discourse. After man’s fall, the Word of God united to himself in his own person the once pure now contaminated human nature. That human nature bore on the cross the just penalty of its sin, but that divine Person suffered by the same act the supremest outrage. At the act of justice God rejoiced and heaven opened. At the outrage the Jews exulted and the earth trembled; and vengeance fell upon Jerusalem. But why this method of redemption? Only those who love can understand the answer. God’s love ungrudgingly reveals itself, and whatever it creates without intermediary is immortal, free, and god-like. Such Was man till made unlike God by sin, and so disfranchised only to be reinstated by a free pardon, or by full atonement. But man cannot humble himself below what he is entitled to, as much as he had striven to exalt himself above it; and therefore he cannot make atonement. So God must reinstate man; and since “all the ways of the Lord are mercy and truth,” God proceedeth both by the way of mercy, and by the way of truth or justice, since by the incarnation man was made capable of reinstating himself. Beatrice further explains that the elements and their compounds are made not direct by God, but by angels, who also draw the life of animal and plant out of compound matter that has the potentiality of such life in it; whereas first matter, the angels, and the heavens are direct creations of God; and so were the bodies of Adam and Eve, which were therefore immortal, save for sin; as are therefore the bodies of the redeemed who are restored to all the privileges of unfallen man. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] “HOSANNAH! Holy God of Sabaoth! making lustrous by thy brightness from above the blessed fires of these kingdoms!” So, revolving to its own note, I saw that being sing, on whom the twin lights double one another:1 and it and the others entered on their dance, and like most rapid sparks, veiled them from me by sudden distance. I, hesitating, said, “Speak to her, speak to her,” within myself, “speak to her,” I said, “to my lady who slaketh my thirst with the sweet drops”; but that reverence which all o’ermastereth me, though but by Be or Ice,2 again down-bowed me, as a man who slumbers.3 Short time Beatrice left me thus; and began, casting the ray upon me of a smile such as would make one blessed though in the flame:

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  The movement and the virtue of the sacred wheelings, as the hammer’s art from the smith,14 must needs be an effluence from the blessed movers; and the heaven which so many lights make beautiful, from the deep mind15 which rolleth it, taketh the image and thereof maketh the seal. And as the soul within your dust, through members differing and conformed to divers powers, doth diffuse itself, so doth the Intelligence deploy its goodness, multiplied through the stars, revolving still on its own unity. Diverse virtue maketh diverse alloy with the precious body which it quickeneth, wherein, as life in you, it is up-bound. By cause of the glad nature whence it floweth, the mingled virtue shineth through the body, as gladness doth through living pupil. Thence cometh what seems different ’twixt light and light, and not from dense and rare; this is the formal principle that produceth, conformably to its own excellence, the turbid and the clear.” 1. Contrast Canto xxiv, note 1.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X I XBeatrice gazes for a moment upon that point of light wherein every where is here and every when is now, and therein reads the questions Dante would fain have her answer. It was not to acquire any good for himself, but that his reflected light might itself have the joy of conscious existence, that God, in his timeless eternity, uttered himself as love in created beings, themselves capable of loving. It is vain to ask what God was doing before the creation, for Time has no relevance except within the range of creation; nor was the first creation itself successive, or temporal at all; for pure form or act (the angels) pure matter or potentiality (the materia prima) and inseparably united act and potentiality (the material heavens) issued into simultaneous being. Jerome was wrong (as Scripture and reason testify) in thinking that the angels were created long before the heavens over which it is the office of certain of them to preside. Dante now knows where the angels were created (in God’s eternity) and when (contemporaneously with Time and with the Heavens) and how (all loving); but has yet to learn how soon certain fell (ere one might count twenty) and why (because of Satan’s pride), and how the less presumptuous ones recognized the source of their swift and wide range of understanding, and so received grace (the acceptance of which was itself a merit), and were confirmed. This instruction were enough, did not the prevalence of erroneous teaching (honest and dishonest) make it needful to add that the angels, ever rejoicing in the direct contemplation of God, see all things always, and therefore exercise no changing stress of attention, and therefore need no power of memory, since their thought never having lost immediate hold of aught needs not to recall aught. Beatrice goes on to denounce the vain and flippant teaching by which the faithful are deluded, and especially the unauthorized pardonings; and finally, returning to the subject of the angels, explains that though in number they surpass the power of human language of conception, yet each has his own specific quality of insight and of resultant love. Such is the wonder of the divine love which breaks himself upon such countless mirrors, yet remains ever one. WHEN BOTH the two children of Latona, covered by the Ram and by the Scales, make the horizon their girdle at one same moment, as long as from the point when the zenith balanceth the scale, till one and the other from that belt unbalanceth itself, changing its hemisphere,1 so long, with a smile traced on her countenance, did Beatrice hold her peace, gazing fixedly on the point which had o’ermastered me; then she began: “I tell, not ask, that which thou fain wouldst hear; for I have seen it where every where and every when is focussed.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Christian had been stepping from side to side, trying to lose Murdoch but instead offering him the kind of challenge he adored. ‘Oh, well . . . I don’t want to – ’ ‘No trouble, Christian, don’t sweat it.’ Kiki nudged Murdoch off with her toe, and then gave him  On Beauty another nudge to direct him out of the room. God forbid Christian should get any dog hairs on those fine Italian shoes. No, that was unfair. Christian slicked down his hair with his palm along that severe parting on the left side of his head, a line so straight it seemed marked out with a ruler. And that too was unfair. ‘I got me cham pagne in one hand and chicken in the other,’ said Kiki, excessively jolly as penance for her thoughts. ‘What can I do you for?’ ‘Oh, God,’ said Christian. He seemed to know a joke should go here but he was constitutionally unable to provide one. ‘Choices, choices.’ ‘Give them here, darling,’ said Howard, taking only the champagne from his wife. ‘Proper hellos first might be nice – you know Meredith, don’t you?’ Meredith – if one were to remember two facts about each of one’s guests in order to introduce them to other guests – was interested in Foucault and costume-wear. At various parties Kiki had listened carefully and yet not understood what Meredith was saying while Meredith was dressed as an English punk, a fin de siècle dame in a drop-waisted Edwardian gown, a French movie star and, most memorably, a forties war bride, her hair set and curled like Bacall’s, complete with stockings and stays and that compelling black line curving up the back of both her mighty calves. This evening Meredith’s dress was a concoction of pink chiffon, with a wide circle skirt you had to make space for, and a little black mohair cardigan slung over her shoulders. This last was set off by a gigantic diamante´ brooch. Her shoes were peep-toe red heels that put at least a three-inch distance between Meredith and her real height as she strode across the room. Meredith stretched out a white kid glove for her hostess to shake. Meredith was twenty-seven years old. ‘Of course! Wow, Meredith!’ said Kiki, blinking theatrically. ‘Honey, I don’t even know what to say. I should have some kind of award for best party outfit – I don’t know what I was thinking. You look fine , girl!’ Kiki whistled, and Meredith, who was still holding one of Kiki’s  kipps and belsey hands, took the opportunity to do a twirl, holding Kiki’s hand high and describing a small circle beneath it.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  Preserve thy munificence8 in me, so that my soul which thou hast made sound, may unloose it from the body, pleasing unto thee. So did I pray; and she, so distant as she seemed, smiled and looked on me, then turned her to the eternal fountain. And the holy elder said: “That thou mayest consummate thy journey perfectly—whereto prayer and holy love dispatched me,— fly with thine eyes throughout this garden; for gazing on it will equip thy glance better to mount through the divine ray. And the Queen of heaven for whom I am all burning with love, will grant us every grace, because I am her faithful Bernard.”9 As is he who perchance from Croatia cometh to look on our Veronica10 and because of ancient fame is sated not, but saith in thought, so long as it be shown; “My Lord Jesus Christ, true God, and was this, then, the fashion of try semblance?” such was I, gazing upon the living love of him who in this world by contemplation tasted of that peace.11 “Son of grace! this joyous being,” he began, “will not become known to thee by holding thine eyes only here down at the base; but look upon the circles even to the remotest, until thou seest enthroned the Queen to whom this realm is subject and devoted.” I lifted up mine eyes, and as at morn the oriental regions of the horizon overcome that where the sun declineth, so, as from the valley rising to the mountain; with mine eyes I saw a region at the boundary surpass all the remaining ridge in light. And as with us that place where we await the chariot pole that Phaeton guided ill,12 is most aglow, and on this side and on that the light is shorn away; so was that pacific oriflamme13 quickened in the midst, on either side in equal measure tempering its flame. And at that mid point, with out-stretched wings, I saw more than a thousand Angels making festival, each one distinct in glow and art.14 I saw there, smiling to their sports and to their songs, a beauty which was gladness in the eyes of all the other saints. And had I equal wealth in speech as in conception, yet dared I not attempt the smallest part of her delightsomeness. Bernard, when he saw mine eyes fixed and eager towards the glowing source of his own glow, turned his eves to her, with so much love that he made mine more ardent to regaze.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  See now the height and breadth of the eternal worth, since it hath made itself so many mirrors wherein it breaketh, remaining in itself one as before.” 1. The Moon (Diana), when at the full, rises just as the Sun (Apollo) sets, or sets as he rises.2. Dante is careful in the use of splendour for reflected, not direct light. (Epist. ad Can. Grand., § 20-23, and Conv. iii. 14.) Therefore we must not understand this passage as declaring the manifestation of his own glory to be God’s motive in creation, but rather the conferring of conscious being, the sense of existence, upon his creatures. “In order that his creatures (i.e., his reflected glory, his splendour) might be able to say: I am.” This is in conformity with what Aquinas and others say as to love as God’s motive in creation. Cf. Canto vii, note 8. 3. If we might read, with some MSS., preceded for proceeded the meaning would be much easier: “Since there is no before nor after save with reference to creation (because Time itself is a creation), the question is equivalent to: What was God doing before there was any before?” But the authority for proceeded is too strong to be neglected. The translation and argument explain the sense in which we take it.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  It was not that I merely read The New Yorker; I lived it in a private way. I had created for myself a New Yorker world (located somewhere east of West-port and west of the Cotswolds) where Peter de Vries (punning softly) was forever lifting a glass of Pies-porter, where Niccolo Tucci (in a plum velvet dinner jacket) flirted in Italian with Muriel Spark, where Nabokov sipped tawny port from a prismatic goblet (while a Red Admirable perched on his pinky), and where John Updike tripped over the master’s Swiss shoes, excusing himself charmingly (repeating all the while that Nabokov was the best writer of English currently holding American citizenship). Meanwhile, the Indian writers clustered in a corner punjabbering away in Sellerian accents (and giving off a pervasive odor of curry) and the Irish memorists (in fishermen’s sweaters and whiskey breath) were busy snubbing the prissily tweedy English memorists. Oh, I had mythicized other magazines and literary quarterlies, too, but The New Yorker had been my shrine since childhood. (Commentary, for example, held rather grubby gatherings at which bilious-looking Semites—all of whom were named Irving—worried each other to death about Jewishness, Blackness, and Consciousness, while dipping into bowls of chopped liver and platters of Nova Scotia.) These soirées amused me, but it was for The New Yorker that I reserved my awe. I never would have dared to send my own puny efforts there, so it outraged and amazed me to find someone I had actually known frequenting its pages. I had, anyway, an altogether exalted notion of what it meant to be an author. I imagined them as a mysterious fraternity of mortals who walked around more nimbly and lightly than other people—as if they somehow had invisible wings on their shoulders. They smiled wryly, recognizing each other by means of a certain something—maybe like the radar bats are said to possess. Certainly nothing so crude as a secret handshake. Bennett was indirectly involved with my writing too, though he seldom read a word I wrote. I did not really need anyone to read my work at that point (because the work was mostly a preparation for the work to come) but I very much needed someone to approve of the act of writing. He did that. At times it was not clear whether he approved of my writing just so that I would not bother him in his depression or whether he enjoyed playing Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle. But the fact was that he believed in me long before I believed in myself. It was as if during that long bad time in our marriage we reached each other indirectly through my writing. Though we did not read it together, we were united by it in our retreat from the world.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  There is no light unless from that serene which never is disturbed, else it is darkness or shadow of the flesh or else its poison.4 Enough is opened to thee now the labyrinth which hid from thee the living justice of which thou hast made question so incessantly; for thou didst say: ‘A man is born upon the bank of Indus and there is none to tell of Christ, nor none to read, nor none to write; and all his volitions and his deeds are good so far as human reason seeth, sinless in life or in discourse. He dieth unbaptized and without faith; where is that justice which condemneth him? where is his fault, in that he not believes?’ Now who art thou who wouldst sit upon the seat to judge at a thousand miles away with the short sight that carries but a span? Truly to him who goeth subtly to work with me, were not the Scripture over you, there were marvellous ground for questioning. O animals of earth, minds gross! the primal Will, good in itself, never departed from its own self which is the highest good. All is just which doth harmonize with it; no created good draweth it to itself,5 but it by raying forth giveth rise to it.” As right above her nest the stork sweepeth when she hath fed her brood, and as the one which she hath fed iooketh up to her; so did (and so did I uplift my brow) the blessed image, which plied its wings driven by so many counsels. Wheeling it sang, and said: “As are my notes to thee who understandest them not, such is the eternal judgment to you mortals.” When those glowing flames of the Holy Spirit were stilled, yet in the ensign which gained the Romans reverence from all the world, it began again: “To this realm ne’er rose one who believed not in Christ, neither before nor after he was nailed unto the tree. But see, many cry Christ, Christ, who at the judgment shall be far less near to him than such as know not Christ; and such Christians the Ethiop shall condemn when the two colleges shall dispart, the one for ever rich, the other stripped. What may the Persians6 say unto your kings when they shall see that volume opened wherein are their dispraises all recorded? There shall be seen amidst the deeds of Albert7 that one which soon shall move its wing to make the realm of Prague a desert.8 There shall be seen the woe which he is bringing on the Seine by making false the coinage,9 who by the wild boar’s stroke shall die. There shall be seen the pride which maketh athirst and doth the Scot and Englishman so madden they may not abide within their proper bound. The lechery shall be seen and life effeminate of him of Spain, and him of Bohemia, who knew not ever worthiness, nor willed it.

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  As the geometer who all sets himself to measure the circle and who findeth not, think as he may, the principle he lacketh;10 such was I at this new-seen spectacle; I would perceive how the image consorteth with the circle, and how it settleth there; but not for this were my proper wings, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its will came to it. To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and will were rolled—even as a wheel that moveth equally—by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.11 1. The Son, when he became man, was made in the Virgin’s womb, and so by human nature. 2. Cf. Canto xxxi, note 8.3. Cf. Canto iv.4. This furnishes one of several consistent indications that in Paradise one can see that at which he is not looking. This is one of the subtle ways in which Dante indicates that all spatial and temporal terms in Paradise are merely symbolical.5. The Cumæan Sybil wrote her oracles on leaves, which die wind then scattered in confusion. Æneid, iii and vi.6. Cf. Canto iii, note 2.7. This knot or complex = the universe.8. When the vision broke, a single moment plunged the actual thing he saw into a deeper oblivion than five and twenty centuries had wrought over the voyage of the Argonauts. The memory of an intent gaze, of deeping vision, of absorbed volition, of a final flash of insight—the assured possession of a will and affections laid to rest by the sweetness of what came to him—the uncertain impression of the images and symbols amid which it came—all these remain: but the vision itself is utterly past recall. Cf. Canto i. The Argo was the first ship,—a new thing to Neptune.9. Cf. Cantos x and xii.10. The problem loosely described as “squaring the circle” is stated by Dante with his usual accuracy. The radius and circumference of a circle being incommensurable, it is impossible to express the circumference in terms of the radius—as impossible as it is to express deity in terms of humanity. The radius being the unit, then, the circle cannot be exactly measured. There is no difficulty in constructing (by means of a cycloid) a square equal in area to a given circle. But cf. Conv. ii. 14.11. “The whole work was undertaken, not for a speculative but for a practical end.” And again: “the purpose of the whole [the Comedy] and of this portion [the Paradiso] is to remove those who are living in this life from the state of wretchedness, and to lead them to the state of blessedness.” Epist. ad Can. Grand., § 16 and 15.

• From The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) (2)

  mandaret luppiter nutu significans, et protinus gradum scitule referens e conspectu facessit. Inse- quitur puella vultu honesta in deae Iunonis speciem similis; nam et caput stringebat diadema candida, ferebat et sceptrum lrrupit alia quam putares Minervam, caput contecta fulgenti galea (et oleaginea corona tegebatur ipsa galea) clypeum attollens et hastam quatiens et qualis illa cum pugnat. Super has introcessit alio visendo decore praepollens, gratia coloris ambrosei designans Venerem, qualis fuit Venus cum fuit virgo, nudo et intecto corpore perfectam formositatem professa, nisi quod tenui pallio bomby- cino inumbrabat spectabilem pubem: quam quidem laciniam curiosulus ventus satis amanter nunc lasci- viens reflabat, ut dimota pateret flos aetatulae, nunc luxurians aspirabat, ut adhaerens pressule membrorum voluptatem graphice deliniaret. Ipse autem color deae diversus in speciem, corpus candidum quod caelo demeat, amictus caerulus quod mari remeat. Iam singulas virgines, quae deae putabantur, sui sequebantur! comites, Iunonem quidem Castor et Pollux, quorum capita cassides ovatae stellarum apicibus insignes contegebant, sed et isti Castores erant scaenici pueri: baec puella varios modulos 1 These two words are inserted by Helm. Some verb has dropped out of the text. ^ | can hardly believe that quod, mari remeat can mean, a8 has usually been suggested, “ because she came from the Sea." A preposition would surely be required before mari, and the contrast between demeat and remeat would be lost. The 528 THE GOLDEN ASS, BOOK X signifying that Jupiter had commanded him so to do, and when he had done his message, he departed very gracefully away. By and by behold there approached a fair and comely maiden, not much unlike to Juno; for she had a white diadem upon her head, and in her hand she bare a regal sceptre ; then followed another resembling Minerva, for she had on her head a shining helmet, whereon was bound a garland made of olive-branches, having in one hand a target or shield, and in the other shaking a spear as when she would fight. Then came another, which passed the others in beauty, and represented the goddess Venus with the colour of ambrosia: but Venus when she was a maiden, and to the end she would shew her perfect beauty, she appeared all naked, saving that her fine and comely middle was lightly covered with a thin silken smock, and this the wanton wind blew hither and thither, sometime lifting it to testify the youth and flower of her age, and sometime making it to cling close to her to shew clearly the form and figure of her members; her colour was of two sorts, for her body was white, as descended from heaven, and her smock was bluish, as returning? to the sea. After every one of these virgins which seemed goddesses, followed certain waiting servants; Castor and Pollux played by boys of the theatre went behind Juno, having on their heads round pointed helmets covered with stars; this virgin Juno in the Ionian manner sounded a flute which she bare in her

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And I awakened to the idea that a great world existed in which things happened and people changed, took risks—more, took notice: a world so sensitive, like a grand piano, that even a step or a word could awaken vibrations in its taut strings. Since the house was built on a very steep hill, the basement wasn’t underground, though its cinderblock walls did smell of damp soil. There were only two rooms in the basement. One was a “rumpus room” with a semicircular glass-brick bar that could be lit from within by a pink, a green and an orange bulb (the blue had burned out). The other room was long and skinny, the wall facing the lake broken by two large windows. Ordinarily a Ping-Pong table was set up in here, its green net never quite taut. Under the overhead lamp my father would lunge and swear and shout and slam or stretch to the very edge of the net to tap the ball delicately into the enemy’s court (for his opponent was inevitably “the enemy,” challenging his wind, strength, skill, prowess). Whenever my sister, a champion athlete, was at the cottage, she enjoyed this interesting power over Dad, while my stepmother and I sat upstairs and read, curled up in front of the fire with Herr Pogner the Persian cat (named after my harpsichord teacher). The cat dozed, feet tucked under her chest, though her raised ears, thin enough to let the lamplight through, twitched and cocked independently of one another with each “Damn!” or “Son of a bitch!” or “Gotcha, young lady, got you there” floating up through the hot-air vents in the floor. My sister’s fainter but delighted reproaches (“Oh, Daddy,” or “Really, Daddy”) didn’t merit even the tiniest adjustment of those feline ears. My stepmother, deep in her Taylor Caldwell or Jane Austen (she was a compulsive, unselective reader), was never too mesmerized by the page not to know when to hurry to the kitchen to present the inevitable victor—drawn, grinning—with his pint of peach ice cream and box of chocolate grahams, which my father would eat in his preferred way, a pat of cold butter on each cracker. Tonight there was no game. The grown-ups were sitting around the fire sipping highballs. Downstairs the table had been replaced by three cots for us boys. Kevin’s parents sent their sons to bed but I was allowed to stay up for another half hour. I was even given a weak highball of my own, though my stepmother murmured, “I’m sure he would rather have orange juice.” “For Chrissake,” my father said, smiling, “give the fella a break.” I was grateful for this unusual display of chumminess and, to please him, said nothing and nodded a lot at what the others said. Kevin’s parents, especially his mother, were unlike any other grown-ups I’d met. They were both Irish, she by origin, he by derivation. He drank till he became drunk, his eyes moist, his laugh general.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In addition to its qualities as a memoir, Speak, Memory serves, along with Chapter Five in Gogol (1944), as the ideal introduction to Nabokov’s art, for some of the most lucid criticism of Nabokov is found in his own books. His most overtly parodic novels spiral in upon themselves and provide their own commentary; sections of The Gift (1937–1938) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) limpidly describe the narrative strategies of later novels. Nabokov’s preoccupations are perhaps best projected by bringing together the opening and closing sentences of Speak, Memory: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” At the end of the book he describes how he and his wife first perceived, through the stratagems thrown up to confound the eye, the ocean liner waiting to take them and their son to America: “It was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture—Find What the Sailor Has Hidden—that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” The Eye (1930) is well titled; the apprehension of “reality” (a word that Nabokov says must always have quotes around it) is first of all a miracle of vision, and our existence is a sequence of attempts to unscramble the “pictures” glimpsed in that “brief crack of light.” Both art and nature are to Nabokov “a game of intricate enchantment and deception,” and the process of reading and rereading his novels is a game of perception, like those E. H. Gombrich writes about in Art and Illusion—everything is there, in sight (no symbols lurking in murky depths), but one must penetrate the trompe-l’oeil, which eventually reveals something totally different from what one had expected. This is how Nabokov seems to envision the game of life and the effect of his novels: each time a “scrambled picture” has been discerned “the finder cannot unsee” it; consciousness has been expanded or created.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  A simple naked woman is apparently much more nauseating than Samson having his eye put out or Ganymede pissing everywhere. Is she really so grotesque? She was a shock, to Katie, at first – like a starkly lit, unforgiving photograph of oneself. But then Katie began to notice all the exterior, human information, not explicitly in the frame but implied by what we see there. Katie is moved by the crenulated marks of absent stockings on her legs, the muscles in her arms suggestive of manual labour. That loose belly that has known many babies, that still fresh face that has lured men in the past and may yet lure more. Katie – a stringbean, physically – can even see her own body contained in this body, as if Rembrandt were saying to her, and to all women: ‘For you are of the earth, as my nude is, and you will come to this point too, and be blessed if you feel as little shame, as much joy, as she!’ This is what a woman is : unadorned, after children and work and age, and experience – these are the marks of  On Beauty living . So Katie feels. And all this from cross-hatching (Katie makes her own comics and knows something of cross-hatching); all these intimations of mortality from an inkpot! Katie comes to class very excited. She sits down excited. She keeps her notebook open before her, determined this time, determined to be one of the three or four people who dare to speak in Dr Belsey’s class. The class, all fourteen of them, are arranged in a square, the desks fitted together so that everyone can see everyone. They have their names written on pieces of paper that are folded in half and stood atop their desks. They look like so many bank managers. Dr Belsey is speaking. ‘What we’re trying to . . . interrogate here,’ he says, ‘is the mytheme of artist as autonomous individual with privileged insight into the human. What is it about these texts – these images as narration – that is implicitly applying for the quasi-mystical notion of genius?’ An awful long silence follows this. Katie bites at the skin around her cuticles. ‘To reframe: is what we see here really a rebellion , a turning away? We’re told that this constitutes a rejection of the classical nude. OK. But. Is this nude not a confirmation of the ideality of the vulgar? As it is already inscribed in the idea of a specifically gendered, class debasement?’ Another silence. Dr Belsey stands up and writes the word  very large on the blackboard behind him. ‘Both these pictures speak of illumination. Why?

• From The Divine Comedy (1950)

  C A N T O X X X IThe redeemed are seen, rank above rank, as the petals of the divine rose; and the angels flying between them and God minister peace and ardour to them, for passion is here peaceful and peace passionate. Nor does this angelic multitude intercept the piercing light of God nor the piercing sight of the redeemed. The realm, whose joy no longer needs the stimulus supplied by the fear of losing it or the effort to retain it, centres its look and love on the triune God. Oh! that he would look down on the storm-tossed earth; from the most evil quarter of which Dante coming to that region is smitten dumb by the contrast. Mutely gazing, as the pilgrim at the shrine of his pilgrimage, thinking to tell again what he has seen, Dante after a time turns to question Beatrice, but finds her gone. Bernard, the type of contemplation, or immediate vision, has come at Beatrice’s request, to bring Dante to the goal of his desire, by directing his eyes to that actual vision of divine things in their true forms for which her patient instructions have prepared him. And he first directs his sight to Beatrice herself in her place of glory. To her he pours out his gratitude, while imploring her further protection and praying that he may live and die worthy of her love; whereon she smiles upon him and then turns to God in whom alone is true and abiding union of human souls. Dante now learns who his guide is and gazes with awe-struck wonder on the features of the saint who had seen God while yet on earth; then, at his prompting, he looks above and sees the glory of Mary like the glory of the dawn, faming amongst countless angels—each one having his own specific beauty of light and gesture—and gladdening all the saints. [image file=image_rsrcA5N.jpg] IN FORM, then, of a white rose displayed itself to me that sacred soldiery which in his blood Christ made his spouse; but the other, which as it flieth seeth and doth sing his glory who enamoureth it, and the excellence which hath made it what it is, like to a swarm of bees which doth one while plunge into the flowers and another while wend back to where its toil is turned to sweetness, ever descended into the great flower adorned with so many leaves, and reascended thence to where its love doth ceaseless make sojourn. They had their faces all of living flame, and wings of gold, and the rest so white that never snow reacheth such limit. When they descended into the flower, from rank to rank they proffered of the peace and of the ardour1 which they acquired as they fanned their sides, nor did the interposing of so great a flying multitude, betwixt the flower and that which was above, impede the vision nor the splendour;

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my pain and despair! She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it was the very geometry of basic reality. The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis—without any utilitarian results. As Edusa’s sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsating hard bench watching Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): “Dolly has a magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?” Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot, pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip. It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop. That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments, immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan to-day with frustration.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  ‘Honey, to be honest, you seemed a little self-absorbed in London. And you were writing, and she likes it when you’re working – she didn’t want to hassle you with it. No matter what you think,’ said Kiki, giving his arm a little squeeze, ‘we all want you to work well. Look, I’ve got to go.’ She kissed him on the cheek as Zora had, nostalgically. A reference to earlier affection.  In January, at the first formal of the year, the tremendous will-power of Wellington’s female students is revealed. Unfortunately for the young women, this demonstration of pure will is accredited to ‘femininity’ – that most passive of virtues – and, as a result, does not contribute to their Grade Point Average. It is unfair. Why are there are no awards for the girl who starves herself through the Christmas period – refusing all sweetmeats, roasts and liqueurs offered to her – so that she might appear at the January formal in a backless dress and toeless shoes, although the temperature is near to freezing and the snow is heavy upon the ground? Howard, who wore a floor-length overcoat, gloves, leather shoes and a thick college scarf, stood by Emerson’s front gate and watched with real awe the mist of white flakes falling upon bare shoulders and hands, the clothed men holding their near-naked, decorative partners as together they stepped around puddles and snowdrifts like ballroom dancers on an assault course. They all looked like princesses – but what steel must lurk within! ‘Evening, Belsey,’ said an old historian of Howard’s acquaintance. Howard nodded his greeting and let the man pass. The historian’s companion for the evening was a young man. Howard thought they both looked happier than the mixed-sex student–faculty partners passing intermittently through the gateway. It was an old tradition, this dinner, but it was not quite a comfortable one. It was never  On Beauty the same teaching the student in question after seeing them in their glad rags – though of course, in Howard’s case, that line had already been crossed and then some. Howard heard the first dinner bell go. This was the call for people to take their seats. He kept his hands in his pockets and waited. It was too cold even to smoke a cigarette. He looked up and across at Wellington Square, at the glinting white spires of the college and the evergreen trees still strung with Christmas lights. In this bitter weather Howard’s eyes watered incessantly. For him, all electric light spread and twinkled; streetlamps sent out fountains of sparks; traffic signals transformed into natural phenomena, glowing and pulsing like the aurora borealis.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  In parodying the reader’s complete, self-indulgent identification with a character, which in its mindlessness limits consciousness, Nabokov is able to create the detachment necessary for a multiform, spatial view of his novels. The “two plots” in Nabokov’s puppet show are thus made plainly visible as a description of the total design of his work, which reveals that in novel after novel his characters try to escape from Nabokov’s prison of mirrors, struggling toward a self-awareness that only their creator has achieved by creating them—an involuted process which connects Nabokov’s art with his life, and clearly indicates that the author himself is not in this prison. He is its creator, and is above it, in control of a book, as in one of those Saul Steinberg drawings (greatly admired by Nabokov) that show a man drawing the very line that gives him “life,” in the fullest sense. But the process of Nabokov’s involution, the global perspective which he invites us to share with him, is best described in Speak, Memory, Chapter Fifteen, when he comments on the disinclination of … physicists to discuss the outside of the inside, the whereabouts of the curvature; for every dimension presupposes a medium within which it can act, and if, in the spiral unwinding of things, space warps into something akin to time, and time, in its turn, warps into something akin to thought, then, surely, another dimension follows—a special Space maybe, not the old one, we trust, unless spirals become vicious circles again. The ultimate detachment of an “outside” view of a novel inspires our wonder and enlarges our potential for compassion because, “in the spiral unwinding of things,” such compassion is extended to include the mind of an author whose deeply humanistic art affirms man’s ability to confront and order chaos. 2. BACKGROUNDS OF LOLITACritics too often treat Nabokov’s twelfth novel as a special case quite apart from the rest of his work, when actually it concerns, profoundly and in their darkest and yet most comic form, the themes which have always occupied him. Although Lolita may still be a shocking novel to several aging non-readers, the exact circumstances of its troubled publication and reception may not be familiar to younger readers. After four American publishers refused it, Madame Ergaz, of Bureau Littéraire Clairouin, Paris, submitted Lolita to Maurice Girodias’ Olympia Press in Paris.10 Although Girodias must be credited with the publication of several estimable if controversial works by writers such as Jean Genet, his main fare was the infamous Travellers Companion series, the green-backed books once so familiar and dear to the eagle-eyed inspectors of the U.S. Customs. But Nabokov did not know this and, because of one of Girodias’ previous publishing ventures, the “Editions du Chěne,” thought him a publisher of “fine editions.” Cast in two volumes and bound in the requisite green, Lolita was quietly published in Paris in September 1955.