Longing

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 The Divine Comedy (1950)

  From the world, to follow her, I fled while yet a girl, and in her habit I enclosed myself, and promised the way of her company. Thereafter men more used to ill than good 11 tore me away from the sweet cloister; and God doth know what my life then became. And this other splendour who revealeth herself to thee on my right side, and who kindleth herself with all the light of our sphere, doth understand of her that which I tell of me. She was a sister, and from her head was taken in like manner the shadow of the sacred veil. Yet, turned back as she was into the world, against her pleasure and against good usage, from her heart’s veil never was she loosened. This is the light of the great Constance, who, from the second blast of Suabia, conceived the third and final might.” 12 Thus did she speak to me, and then began to sing Ave Maria, and vanished as she sang, like to a heavy thing through the deep water. My sight, which followed her far as it might, when it had lost her turned to the target of a greater longing, and bent itself all upon Beatrice; but she so flashed upon my look, that at the first my sight endured it not; and this made me the slower with my questioning. 1. Narcissus took his own reflection for an actual being. Dante took the actual beings he now saw for reflections. 2. A substance is anything that exists in itself, e.g., a man, a tree, a sword. It is opposed to accident, that which exists only as an experience or an attribute of some “substance.” e.g., love, greenness, brightness. Compare Vita Nuova, § 25. 3. thy name, and your lot (i.e., the Jot thou sharest with thy companions). 4. Piccarda was the daughter of Simone Donati, and the sister of Dante’s friend Forese (see Purg. xxiii) and of the celebrated Corso (cf. Gardner i, “Blacks and Whites,” and Villani, vii). Dante’s wife Gemma was the daughter of Manetto Donati, and she too had a brother Forese (Dante’s brother-in-law therefore). This has often given rise to confusion. 5. Slowest in the daily revolution from East to West, because nearest to the centre of the Earth and of the whole celestial rotation; but swiftest in the sense that its proper motion (from West to East) has a shorter period than that of any other sphere. 6. Rejoice to have their form, or essential being, in conformity to the divine order, which is itself the form of the universe. Cf. Canto i, and also vii, note 16. 7. For this and six following stanzas cf. Canto vi. 8. “That it createth, out of nothing, as angels and rational souls, and that nature makethy that is produceth by generating” (Benvenuto). Cf. Canto, vii 9. Gara (1194-1253), the friend and disciple of Francis of Assisi. 10. Note the qualification. Not all vows are accepted. See Canto v. 11. Her brother Corso, especially, who compelled her to marry Ros, sellino della Tosa, a man of violent and factious character with whom at the time he sought alliance. 12. Frederick Barbarossa, his son Henry VI and his grandson Frederick II, are the three “blasts of Suabia.” Constance was the heiress of the Norman house of Tancred which had conquered Sicily and Southern Italy from the Saracens in the eleventh century, and so of the crown of “the two Sicilies” (Naples and Sicily). See Villani, iv and v, and Introduction.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  If I imagine Mr. Pouchet masturbating I see him turning the light on and blinking as he hunts for some tissue, which he puts on the night table beside his cot. An annoying but necessary task. He’s wearing a clean white T-shirt and blue cotton pajama bottoms. He’s an entirely serious person, a lonely adult. Off with the light. He folds the blankets down till their doubled weight rests on his knees. He pulls the sheet halfway up his chest, so that whatever happens under it will seem less sordid—or so he tells himself. (The truth is, the sheet declares the autonomy of desire, just as a tan line, by isolating the genitals, emphasizes them.) His dark hand pulls open the pajama flap and grabs his penis, which in a moment is as hard as hickory, but his thoughts are scattered, the flesh is strong but the spirit is weak. He assembles the features of various girls he’s known or seen in magazines or movies into a face he kisses, then violates—wrong, cancel—kisses again. And then he sees mental pictures of that time Julie and he were lying on the rug and talking about their futures. They were going to different colleges, they’d be apart for a year, suddenly his hand is rubbing those panties over a mound that just barely hints through the thick spandex that there might be an opening below—and then he’s wriggled under the armor into something flossy, ringleted and then hot and wet and labyrinthine and straining up to meet his fingers even as her throat moans no and she gasps, “Too sweet, you’re so …” And she buried her face in his sleeve, bit a fold in his shirt. She pulled away and sat him on a chair across the room from her and mimed fluffing her skirt and straightening her hair and said, “There, now,” but she didn’t turn on the lights, he noticed, and in a moment he had scooted back over and was sitting on the floor below her chair and he was kissing her knee very tenderly, respectfully, but his hand was straying almost in spite of itself back up between her smooth warm legs, as lean as a boy’s, as warm as new bread, while his other hand clawed at his own trousers and he whispered, hoarse and dry-mouthed, “Julie, just let me, just this much, something to remember—” I came. I had seen. He could conquer me. If I was Julie or Helen or whoever else, just so long as I was in his mind somehow. Or no, perhaps I didn’t want to be a character in Mr. Pouchet’s head, just a virus that had entered the very gland of his consciousness from which I could study, even experience, his longing for a woman. I didn’t want him to like men, just me, not even me as a man but me as discarnate ardor, pure willingness in his naive, manly, exquisitely untested arms.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and L. was between the woman and me (she had squeezed herself in, the pet). In my turn, I launched upon a hilarious account of my arctic adventures. The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah! All the while I was acutely aware of L.’s nearness and as I spoke I gestured in the merciful dark and took advantage of those invisible gestures of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauze which she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had completely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and I chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and once or twice felt with my rapid lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her to a quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too, fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit it and sent the doll flying into the dark, and I laughed and addressed myself to Haze across Lo’s legs to let my hand creep up my nymphet’s thin back and feel her skin through her boy’s shirt. But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing, and my clothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost glad when her mother’s quiet voice announced in the dark: “And now we all think that Lo should go to bed.” “I think you stink,” said Lo. “Which means there will be no picnic tomorrow,” said Haze. “This is a free country,” said Lo. When angry Lo with a Bronx cheer had gone, I stayed on from sheer inertia, while Haze smoked her tenth cigarette of the evening and complained of Lo.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  When he was at rest, where did the speed go? During our field trips I’d sit beside him in a hardwood pew or stand close to him under a dusty chandelier as men’s voices chanted behind the iconostasis and I felt as though I were already Mr. Pouchet’s lover and why not, for he was as much a superfluous man as I was an excluded boy. Every morning at six he was out on the track running through the mist, stopwatch in hand, puffs of vapor issuing from his mouth, but surely he was running down. I had no idea how old he was (twenty-something), but doubtless he was declining physically. Here he comes, blood drained from his dark cheeks, lips purple and open to reveal wet, white teeth, legs lean and slightly bowed, the calves compact, not bulging, his whole body so intelligent that despite its hairiness nothing about it suggests an animal. He’s the cautious, isolated man who sleeps alone, rises before dawn, runs, irons his chinos, pares his beautiful nails that haven’t a single ridge or moon in them but that seem built up out of layer after layer of clear lacquer, who never seems to have a headache or hangover, who’s a well-maintained machine but idling, idling, who approaches each new experience (the iconostasis doors break open and the black nave floods over with candlelight: Christ is risen) in a spirit of mildly detached curiosity, and yet nothing has touched him. He is vulnerable and he’s untouched. He is a man to whom something is about to happen. In the meantime he sits under the buzzing fluorescent lamp over his desk in his dorm room and grades algebra quizzes. Between the first and second hour in the study hall in the evening the boys have ten free minutes. A bell rings, they explode out of their rooms, toilets flush, four guys are pounding a fifth where the stairs turn and Mr. Pouchet winds the gold wristwatch he received for high school graduation not so many years ago, stands and looks out his window across the courtyard at the opposite windows filled with yellow light and the coming and going of the upper formers. Mr. Pouchet is waiting. His mind is open, patient, expectant. Perhaps he’s the Buddhist, perhaps the Buddha, and if he doesn’t focus on this state of grace, then that oblivion is proof he’s blessed. If I imagine Mr. Pouchet masturbating I see him turning the light on and blinking as he hunts for some tissue, which he puts on the night table beside his cot. An annoying but necessary task. He’s wearing a clean white T-shirt and blue cotton pajama bottoms. He’s an entirely serious person, a lonely adult. Off with the light. He folds the blankets down till their doubled weight rests on his knees.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  Not every kid had a horse, like Velvet Brown in 1935’s National Velvet , but every girl had a body. She made Margaret boy crazy, the way she was in her junior high years. Over the course of the novel, Margaret maintains a private crush on fourteen-year-old Moose Freed, who she meets through Nancy’s older brother. Moose starts cutting the Simon family’s lawn on Saturday mornings, after Margaret’s father—a lifelong city dweller—nearly slices off his hand with the power mower. Margaret pines for Moose from the window while he works. “I pretended to be really busy reading a book, but the truth is—I was watching Moose… Moose would be number one in my Boy Book if only I was brave enough, but what would Nancy think? She hated him.” Instead, Margaret, as Mavis, picks the much less controversial Philip Leroy to top off her list of crushes. Philip is the safe choice—the cute guy in her class who everyone likes. But one afternoon before a school dance, Margaret admits to God that she, too, has been sucked into Philip’s pre-teen gravitational pull: “It’s not so much that I like him as a person, God, but as a boy he’s very handsome. And I’d love to dance with him.” Later that night, Margaret gets her wish, though the reality is considerably less transporting than she’d hoped. Philip is a clumsy dancer who steps on her toes and Nancy, standing right next to them in the school gym, almost starts crying because she’s so jealous. Margaret has her first kiss with Philip Leroy, at a party during a game of Two Minutes in the Closet. There, in the dark and between her nervous giggles, he gives her a quick peck on the lips. “A really fast kiss! Not the kind you see in the movies where the boy and girl cling together for a long time,” Margaret says. Even still, she’s pretty sure she liked it. For Judy, channeling those awkward, early crushes came easily. As a kid, she was “always in love,” she told the UK Independent in 1999 while promoting her adult novel Summer Sisters . By age fourteen, just a few years older than Margaret, she said she was regularly going to “make-out parties… you invited a group of boys and girls, and you turned out the lights, and you played.” Writing Are You There God? , Judy could convincingly borrow from those experiences in part because they still spoke to her, calling out from the depths of her memory. Compared to her committed, responsible twenties, her teenage years felt ecstatic and full of life. “When you’re that age, everything is still there in front of you,” Blume has said of her adolescence. “You have the opportunity to be almost anyone you want.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Why should she?” “But why not? You’re handsome and intelligent.” “Handsome! With these big nostrils!” “Oh that’s just your sister. She’s so frustrated she has to pick on you. There’s nothing wrong with your nostrils. At least I don’t see anything wrong. Of course, I know you too well. If you like, we could consult a nose doctor.” A long pause. “Nostrils … Do people generally dwell on them? I mean, do people think about them a lot?” Small, high voice: “Are mine okay?” A hopeless silence. At last she began to snore delicately and I hurried to my own room. My sister’s door, next to mine, was closed but her light was burning resentfully. And I gave myself over to my reverie. I had a record player I’d paid for myself by working as a caddy and records I exchanged each week at the library, the music an outpost of my father’s influence in this unmusical female territory. I slipped out of my clothes as quickly as possible, though I tried to do everything beautifully, as in a movie of my life with Helen. In some way I felt it was already being filmed—not that I looked for hidden cameras but I simplified and smoothed out my movements for the lens. There were those, my mother and sister, who suffered too much and were too graceless to be film-worthy, but there were those others I aspired to join who suffered briefly, consolably and always handsomely, whose remarks were terse and for whom the mechanics of leaving a party or paying a bill had been stylized nearly out of existence in favor of highly emotional exchanges in which eyes said more than lips. Every detail of my room asked me to be solicitous. When the dresser drawer stuck I winced—this sequence would have to be reshot. I turned my sheets down as though she, Helen, were at my side. I rushed to snap off the lights. She and I lay side by side in the narrow boat and floated downstream. The stars moved not at all and only the occasional fluttering of a branch overhead or the sound of a scraping rock below suggested our passage. The moon was the wound in the night’s side from which magic blood flowed; we bathed in it. By dawn I’d made love to Helen four times. The first time was so ceremonial I had a problem molding the mist into arms and legs; all that kept flickering up at me was her smile. The second time was more passionate. I was finally able to free her breasts from their binding. By the third time we’d become gently fraternal; we smiled with tired kindness at each other. We were very intimate.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The “studio bed” in my former room had long been converted into the sofa it had always been at heart, and Charlotte had warned me since the very beginning of our cohabitation that gradually the room would be turned into a regular “writer’s den.” A couple of days after the British Incident, I was sitting in a new and very comfortable easy chair, with a large volume in my lap, when Charlotte rapped with her ring finger and sauntered in. How different were her movements from those of my Lolita, when she used to visit me in her dear dirty blue jeans, smelling of orchards in nymphetland; awkward and fey, and dimly depraved, the lower buttons of her shirt unfastened. Let me tell you, however, something. Behind the brashness of little Haze, and the poise of big Haze, a trickle of shy life ran that tasted the same, that murmured the same. A great French doctor once told my father that in near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same “voice.” So Charlotte sauntered in. She felt all was not well between us. I had pretended to fall asleep the night before, and the night before that, as soon as we had gone to bed, and had risen at dawn. Tenderly, she inquired if she were not “interrupting.” “Not at the moment,” I said, turning volume C of the Girls’ Encyclopedia around to examine a picture printed “bottom-edge” as printers say. Charlotte went up to a little table of imitation mahogany with a drawer. She put her hand upon it. The little table was ugly, no doubt, but it had done nothing to her. “I have always wanted to ask you,” she said (businesslike, not coquettish), “why is this thing locked up? Do you want it in this room? It’s so abominably uncouth.” “Leave it alone,” I said. I was Camping in Scandinavia. “Is there a key?” “Hidden.” “Oh, Hum …” “Locked up love letters.” She gave me one of those wounded-doe looks that irritated me so much, and then, not quite knowing if I was serious, or how to keep up the conversation, stood for several slow pages (Campus, Canada, Candid Camera, Candy) peering at the window-pane rather than through it, drumming upon it with sharp almond-and-rose fingernails. Presently (at Canoeing or Canvasback) she strolled up to my chair and sank down, tweedily, weightily, on its arm, inundating me with the perfume my first wife had used. “Would his lordship like to spend the fall here?” she asked, pointing with her little finger at an autumn view in a conservative Eastern State. “Why?” (very distinctly and slowly). She shrugged. (Probably Harold used to take a vacation at that time. Open season. Conditional reflex on her part.) “I think I know where that is,” she said, still pointing. “There is a hotel I remember, Enchanted Hunters, quaint, isn’t it? And the food is a dream. And nobody bothers anybody.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  “You’ve again hurt my wrist, you brute,” said Lolita in a small voice as she slipped into her car seat. “I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling,” I said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the conversation—to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: “Vivian is quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda pop.” “Sometimes,” said Lo, “you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married and has Negro blood.” “I thought,” I said kidding her, “Quilty was an ancient flame of yours, in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale.” “What?” countered Lo, her features working. “That fat dentist? You must be confusing me with some other fast little article.” And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their nymphancy. 19With Lo’s knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were P.O. Wace and P.O. Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short but slow queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues’ gallery. Handsome Bryan Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion fair, was wanted for kidnaping. A sad-eyed old gentleman’s faux-pas was mail fraud, and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed, and should be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen, wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller. I forget my letters; as to Dolly’s, there was her report and a very special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and perused its contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to mind and drifted toward the newsstand near the exit. “Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of my—and the author’s—Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother’s confinement (our baby, alas, did not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still bear traces of the paint.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  But when Nat King Cole came on singing “Nature Boy” the mood shifted. Miri was wondering who she’d dance the first slow dance with, when out of nowhere a dark-haired boy, someone Miri had never seen before, came up to her, wrapped his arms around her and held her close, as if they’d been dancing together forever. Well, swaying was more like it, but even so…There was a boy, a very strange enchanted boy… She could feel the pack of Luckies in his shirt pocket. She didn’t know they were Luckies but she imagined they were. She wondered what he felt holding her that way and hoped it wasn’t her Hidden Treasure bra. Give a girl a Peter Pan and she will grow, grow, grow… Not likely Nat King Cole would record that one. She had to stop herself from talking, from asking questions the way she did when she was nervous, because she sensed this boy didn’t want to talk. She prayed the palms of her hands wouldn’t sweat, that her deodorant was working, that the faint scent of her mother’s Arpège would reach his nostrils. His breath was near her ear, making her tingle. Then the song ended and he was gone, like Cinderella racing from the ball, but without a shoe, glass or otherwise, left behind to help her find him. She didn’t even know his name. She doubted he knew hers, either. She hoped her blue angora sweater—the one she kept in a garment bag on the top shelf of the fridge—had shed just enough onto his flannel shirt to remind him of her. When someone turned out the lights Miri snuck away and headed upstairs to Natalie’s bedroom. She wasn’t in the mood for playing Rotation after dancing with the sexy stranger. Upstairs, she lay on one of Natalie’s twin beds, the bed she slept in almost every Saturday night, but not tonight, because tomorrow was her mother’s birthday and she needed to be home to bring her breakfast in bed, a tradition started three years ago, when permission to use the stove was finally granted. Miri liked to pretend this was her room. The starched organdy skirt on the dressing table was as pretty as any summer dress. Attach a couple of straps and she could wear it to the ninth-grade prom in June. She knew that inside the dresser lay piles of cashmere sweaters. Miri had once counted them. Fourteen. Natalie was embarrassed. “We get them at a discount. From the cashmere sweater lady. You should come over next time she’s here.” As if Miri could afford to buy cashmere sweaters, even at a discount. More than once Miri had allowed herself to fantasize being a part of Natalie’s perfect family. If Natalie’s mother died—not a gruesome, slow death, but something fast and dramatic, say a car crash—Natalie’s father could marry Miri’s mother, who was young and beautiful and single.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I have always been devoted to cultural shrines: the house where Keats died in Rome, the house where he lived in Hampstead, Mozart’s birthplace in Salzburg, Alexander Pope’s Grotto, Rembrandt’s house in the Amsterdam ghetto, Wagner’s villa on Lake Lucerne, Beethoven’s meager two-room flat in Vienna…. Any place where some genius had been born, lived, worked, ate, farted, spilled his seed, loved, or died—was sacred to me. As sacred as Delphi or the Parthenon. More sacred, in fact, because the wonder of everyday life fascinates me even more than the wonder of great shrines and temples. That Beethoven could write such music while living in two shabby rooms in Vienna—this was the miracle. I had stared with awe at all his mundane artifacts—and the more mundane the better: his tarnished salt box, his cheap clock, his battered ledger book. The very ordinariness of his needs comforted me and made me feel hopeful. I would sniff around the houses of the great like a bloodhound, trying to catch the scent of genius. Somewhere between the bathroom and the bedroom, somewhere between eating an egg and taking a crap, the muse alights. She does not usually appear where your banal Hollywood notions have led you to most expect her: in a gorgeous sunset over Ischia, in the pounding surf of Big Sur, on a mountaintop in Delphi (right between the navel of the earth and the place where Oedipus killed his papa)—but she wings in while you are peeling onions or eating eggplant or lining the garbage can with the book-review section of The New York Times. The most interesting modern writers know this. Leopold Bloom fries kidneys, takes a crap, and considers the universe. Ponge sees the soul of man in an oyster (as Blake saw it in a wild flower). Plath cuts her finger and experiences revelation. But Hollywood insists on imagining the artist as a dreamy-eyed matinee idol with a flowing bow tie, Dmitri Tiomkin’s music in the background, and a violent orange sunset above his head—and, to some extent, all of us (even those of us who should know better) try to live up to this image. I was still, in short, tempted to take off with Adrian. And Bennett, sensing this, trundled me off to Freud’s house at Berggasse, 19, to try (once more) to bring me back to my senses. I agreed with Bennett that Freud was an intuitive genius, but I did not agree with the psychoanalytic doctrine of His Infallibility: geniuses are always fallible; otherwise they’d be gods. And who wants perfection, anyway? Or consistency? After you outgrow adolescence, Herman Hesse, Kahlil Gibran, and the belief in your parents’ transcendent evil—you shouldn’t even want consistency. But alas, so many of us do. And are ready to tear our lives apart just for the lack of it. Like me.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  By the time they were fifteen they’d already been lovers for three years and their friends regarded them as older and wiser mentors—parents, really—to whom they could turn for advice. We’d all drop by her house around four-thirty or five. She and he would be coming up out of the basement, smiling, flushed, his fingers on his fly buttons, hers tugging her tartan skirt a quarter-circle around so that the giant safety pin would be on the right side. Then she’d bake chocolate chip cookies while he horsed around outside with a football. Our own parents had only to say a word to us to inject scalding resentment into our veins, but these lesser, better parents, matured not by years but by passion and its induction into sadness, seemed to be mild guardians, he with his chipped tooth and froth of sweat curls above his neck, she with the childhood scar that drew a silky white stitch through one eyebrow and with the melancholy smile. Even the suppers we sat down to of cold milk and hot cookies pocked with runny chocolate were wonderfully unhealthy parodies of nursery meals. At first I didn’t know how to become really popular. The other kids had grown up together and they just more or less accepted one another. Of course, some of them worked at being popular, but others preferred watching TV alone in the afternoons while drinking beer and some had special interests (sewing, dramatics, yearbook, world affairs) that drew them off into tight little groups too peripheral to count. Still others, by virtue of a sudden blossoming into physical beauty or athletic prowess, became leaders without worrying about it. But that left the whole middle ground of those of us with no strange little niche and no inherent distinction (except brains, possibly, or money, neither of which carried much weight), and for us the only way to win popularity was through “personality.” Girls, of course, had personality more than boys, but some boys had personality, too, as a jester has jokes or a seducer sherry. Something bogus, that is, something shameful. I set my sights on the most popular boy in the whole school. I figured that if I could hoodwink him into being my friend, people would have to accept me. I think my strategy, on the whole, was sound.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  As a case history, “Lolita” will become, no doubt, a classic in psychiatric circles. As a work of art, it transcends its expiatory aspects; and still more important to us than scientific significance and literary worth, is the ethical impact the book should have on the serious reader; for in this poignant personal study there lurks a general lesson; the wayward child, the egotistic mother, the panting maniac—these are not only vivid characters in a unique story: they warn us of dangerous trends; they point out potent evils. “Lolita” should make all of us—parents, social workers, educators—apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. Widworth, Mass. August 5, 1955 Part One1Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. 2I was born in 1910, in Paris. My father was a gentle, easy-going person, a salad of racial genes: a Swiss citizen, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in his veins. I am going to pass around in a minute some lovely, glossy-blue picture-postcards. He owned a luxurious hotel on the Riviera. His father and two grandfathers had sold wine, jewels and silk, respectively. At thirty he married an English girl, daughter of Jerome Dunn, the alpinist, and granddaughter of two Dorset parsons, experts in obscure subjects—paleopedology and Aeolian harps, respectively. My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I was soon to be taken out of the car (Hi, Melmoth, thanks a lot, old fellow)—and was, indeed, looking forward to surrender myself to many hands, without doing anything to cooperate, while they moved and carried me, relaxed, comfortable, surrendering myself lazily, like a patient, and deriving an eerie enjoyment from my limpness and the absolutely reliable support given me by the police and the ambulance people. And while I was waiting for them to run up to me on the high slope, I evoked a last mirage of wonder and hopelessness. One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out, I rested a while on a boulder, and then, thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors—for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company—both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic—one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  There is a touch of the mythological and the enchanted in those large stores where according to ads a career girl can get a complete desk-to-date wardrobe, and where little sister can dream of the day when her wool jersey will make the boys in the back row of the classroom drool. Lifesize plastic figures of snubbed-nosed children with dun-colored, greenish, brown-dotted, faunish faces floated around me. I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fish-like, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it, and repaired to the nearest hotel, well pleased with my day. Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters which Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo’s camp. I could have telephoned but fearing my voice might go out of control and lapse into coy croaks of broken English, I decided to send a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was! How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and small daughter? Homberg and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll mistake—the “g” at the end—which eventually came through may have been a telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine. And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the philter I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg! Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told—forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to sleep? Certainly not: much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic planetarium with its live stardust. Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical. 26This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head—everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  CREAMED CHICKEN ON TOAST POINTS WITH BUTTERED PEAS PORK CHOP WITH CREAMED MUSHROOM SAUCE CHOPPED STEAK WITH CREAMY MUSHROOM SAUCE TUNA CASSEROLE WITH CREAMED CORN Everything was creamy. Ugh! She hated creamy sauces. At the very bottom was a children’s menu. SPAGHETTI WITH BUTTER GRILLED CHEESE HOT DOG It would be embarrassing to order off the children’s menu but better than ordering creamed something or other and not eating a bite. Frekki leaned over and whispered, “The menu is so goyish, but they’ll make you grilled cheese if you’d like.” The waitress gave Miri a look when she ordered grilled cheese but Frekki came to her rescue. “She can have whatever she wants,” Frekki told the waitress. “Just charge me for a second tuna casserole and bring her the grilled cheese.” Miri might like this woman, if only she were allowed to. Frekki smoked an Old Gold while they were waiting for their food, her diamond ring sparkling in the sunlight, her nails polished dark red to match the color of her lipstick. “Nasty habit,” Frekki said, as she flicked an ash into the glass ashtray on the table. “Take it from me. Don’t start.” Miri had already decided she wouldn’t, even though it looked so sophisticated. All the movie stars smoked. Rusty limited herself to two a day, one after lunch and one after dinner. Henry smoked. Leah didn’t. Corinne didn’t but Dr. O and Daisy did. Irene didn’t. Ben Sapphire smoked a cigar after dinner. Then there was Mason and his Luckies. Everyone left the restaurant at about the same time and headed across the way to the Paper Mill Playhouse, an old mill turned into a theater, where Frekki snapped a picture of Miri, her coat unbuttoned to show off her birthday sweater and Rusty’s pearls. Before they were shown to their seats, Frekki bought Miri a souvenir program. At one point during the performance Frekki looked over at her and smiled. They came out humming “The Desert Song,” the most popular song in the operetta. “I’ve always wanted a daughter,” Frekki said. “I have two sons but they wouldn’t be caught dead at an operetta.” “Maybe they’ll get married and you’ll have daughters-in-law who’ll go with you.” “That’d be nice, though daughters-in-law don’t always like their husbands’ mothers.” “But if you’re nice to them…” Miri thought of Irene and Leah, who liked each other. “Yes, maybe,” Frekki said. “I hope so. But that’s still years away. You’ll have to meet the boys. They’re seventeen and nineteen. It’s good for a girl to have boy cousins.” Cousins, Miri thought. I have boy cousins. After the show they stopped for ice cream at Gruning’s on the Hill. There was a line waiting for tables. But Frekki said, “Oh, look…” and she pointed to a table. Miri followed her gaze to a table with a man seated facing them. He waved to Frekki. Was this Frekki’s husband, Dr. J. J.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Faceless, then, are the chappies I happened to see in her company. There was for instance Red Sweater who one day, the day we had the first snow—saw her home; from the parlor window I observed them talking near our porch. She wore her first cloth coat with a fur collar; there was a small brown cap on my favorite hairdo—the fringe in front and the swirl at the sides and the natural curls at the back—and her damp-dark moccasins and white socks were more sloppy than ever. She pressed as usual her books to her chest while speaking or listening, and her feet gestured all the time: she would stand on her left instep with her right toe, remove it backward, cross her feet, rock slightly, sketch a few steps, and then start the series all over again. There was Windbreaker who talked to her in front of a restaurant one Sunday afternoon while his mother and sister attempted to walk me away for a chat; I dragged along and looked back at my only love. She had developed more than one conventional mannerism, such as the polite adolescent way of showing one is literally “doubled up” with laughter by inclining one’s head, and so (as she sensed my call), still feigning helpless merriment, she walked backward a couple of steps, and then faced about, and walked toward me with a fading smile. On the other hand, I greatly liked—perhaps because it reminded me of her first unforgettable confession—her trick of sighing “oh dear!” in humorous wistful submission to fate, or emitting a long “no-o” in a deep almost growling undertone when the blow of fate had actually fallen. Above all—since we are speaking of movement and youth—I liked to see her spinning up and down Thayer Street on her beautiful young bicycle: rising on the pedals to work on them lustily, then sinking back in a languid posture while the speed wore itself off; and then she would stop at our mailbox and, still astride, would flip through a magazine she found there, and put it back, and press her tongue to one side of her upperlip and push off with her foot, and again sprint through pale shade and sun.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  5The days of my youth, as I look back on them, seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car. In my sanitary relations with women I was practical, ironical and brisk. While a college student, in London and Paris, paid ladies sufficed me. My studies were meticulous and intense, although not particularly fruitful. At first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as many manqué talents do; but I was even more manqué than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor, set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds. Paris suited me. I discussed Soviet movies with expatriates. I sat with uranists in the Deux Magots. I published tortuous essays in obscure journals. I composed pastiches: … Fräulein von Kulp may turn, her hand upon the door; I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor that Gull. A paper of mine entitled “The Proustian theme in a letter from Keats to Benjamin Bailey” was chuckled over by the six or seven scholars who read it. I launched upon an “Histoire abrégée de la poésie anglaise” for a prominent publishing firm, and then started to compile that manual of French literature for English-speaking students (with comparisons drawn from English writers) which was to occupy me throughout the forties—and the last volume of which was almost ready for press by the time of my arrest. I found a job—teaching English to a group of adults in Auteuil. Then a school for boys employed me for a couple of winters. Now and then I took advantage of the acquaintances I had formed among social workers and psychotherapists to visit in their company various institutions, such as orphanages and reform schools, where pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes could be stared at in perfect impunity remindful of that granted one in dreams. Now I wish to introduce the following idea. Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  This state of affairs lasted from 1935 to 1939. Her only asset was a muted nature which did help to produce an odd sense of comfort in our small squalid flat: two rooms, a hazy view in one window, a brick wall in the other, a tiny kitchen, a shoe-shaped bath tub, within which I felt like Marat but with no whitenecked maiden to stab me. We had quite a few cozy evenings together, she deep in her Paris-Soir, I working at a rickety table. We went to movies, bicycle races and boxing matches. I appealed to her stale flesh very seldom, only in cases of great urgency and despair. The grocer opposite had a little daughter whose shadow drove me mad; but with Valeria’s help I did find after all some legal outlets to my fantastic predicament. As to cooking, we tacitly dismissed the pot-au-feu and had most of our meals at a crowded place in rue Bonaparte where there were wine stains on the table cloth and a good deal of foreign babble. And next door, an art dealer displayed in his cluttered window a splendid, flamboyant, green, red, golden and inky blue, ancient American estampe—a locomotive with a gigantic smokestack, great baroque lamps and a tremendous cowcatcher, hauling its mauve coaches through the stormy prairie night and mixing a lot of spark-studded black smoke with the furry thunder clouds. These burst. In the summer of 1939 mon oncle d’Amérique died bequeathing me an annual income of a few thousand dollars on condition I came to live in the States and showed some interest in his business. This prospect was most welcome to me. I felt my life needed a shake-up. There was another thing, too: moth holes had appeared in the plush of matrimonial comfort. During the last weeks I had kept noticing that my fat Valeria was not her usual self; had acquired a queer restlessness; even showed something like irritation at times, which was quite out of keeping with the stock character she was supposed to impersonate. When I informed her we were shortly to sail for New York, she looked distressed and bewildered. There were some tedious difficulties with her papers. She had a Nansen, or better say Nonsense, passport which for some reason a share in her husband’s solid Swiss citizenship could not easily transcend; and I decided it was the necessity of queuing in the préfecture, and other formalities, that had made her so listless, despite my patiently describing to her America, the country of rosy children and great trees, where life would be such an improvement on dull dingy Paris.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A fly would settle and walk in the vicinity of her navel or explore her tender pale areolas. She tried to catch it in her fist (Charlotte’s method) and then would turn to the column Let’s Explore Your Mind. “Let’s explore your mind. Would sex crimes be reduced if children obeyed a few don’ts? Don’t play around public toilets. Don’t take candy or rides from strangers. If picked up, mark down the license of the car.” “… and the brand of the candy,” I volunteered. She went on, her cheek (recedent) against mine (pursuant); and this was a good day, mark, O reader! “If you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read—” “We,” I quip-quoted, “medieval mariners, have placed in this bottle—” “If,” she repeated, “you don’t have a pencil, but are old enough to read and write—this is what the guy means, isn’t it, you dope—scratch the number somehow on the roadside.” “With your little claws, Lolita.’ ” 3She had entered my world, umber and black Humberland, with rash curiosity; she surveyed it with a shrug of amused distaste; and it seemed to me now that she was ready to turn away from it with something akin to plain repulsion. Never did she vibrate under my touch, and a strident “what d’you think you are doing?” was all I got for my pains. To the wonderland I had to offer, my fool preferred the corniest movies, the most cloying fudge. To think that between a Hamburger and a Humburger, she would—invariably, with icy precision—plump for the former. There is nothing more atrociously cruel than an adored child. Did I mention the name of that milk bar I visited a moment ago? It was, of all things, The Frigid Queen. Smiling a little sadly, I dubbed her My Frigid Princess. She did not see the wistful joke. Oh, do not scowl at me, reader, I do not intend to convey the impression that I did not manage to be happy. Reader must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite our tiffs, despite her nastiness, despite all the fuss and faces she made, and the vulgarity, and the danger, and the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise. The able psychiatrist who studies my case—and whom by now Dr. Humbert has plunged, I trust, into a state of leporine fascination—is no doubt anxious to have me take my Lolita to the seaside and have me find there, at last, the “gratification” of a lifetime urge, and release from the “subconscious” obsession of an incomplete childhood romance with the initial little Miss Lee.