Pale Fire

by Vladimir Nabokov

All colors made me happy: even gray. 30 My eyes were such that literally they Took photographs.

One day, When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy— A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy— Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed, There was a sudden sunburst in my head. And then black night. That blackness was sublime.

There was a time in my demented youth When somehow I suspected that the truth About survival after death was known 170 To every human being: I alone Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy Of books and people hid the truth from me.

There was the day when I began to doubt Man’s sanity: How could he live without Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

The swelling torment: “That’s the awkward age.” “She should take riding lessons,” you would say (Your eyes and mine not meeting). “She should play Tennis, or badminton. Less starch, more fruit! She may not be a beauty, but she’s cute.”

Was a larvorium and a violet: A grave in Reason’s early spring. And yet It missed the gist of the whole thing; it missed What mostly interests the preterist; For we die every day; oblivion thrives 520 Not on dry thighbones but on blood-ripe lives, And our best yesterdays are now foul piles Of crumpled names, phone numbers and foxed files.

Time means succession, and succession, change: Hence timelessness is bound to disarrange Schedules of sentiment.

“What is that funny creaking—do you hear?” “It is the shutter on the stairs, my dear.” “If you’re not sleeping, let’s turn on the light. I hate that wind! Let’s play some chess.” “All right.” “I’m sure it’s not the shutter. There—again.” “It is a tendril fingering the pane.” “What glided down the roof and made that thud?” 660 “It is old winter tumbling in the mud.” “And now what shall I do? My knight is pinned.”

I mused as I drove homeward: take the hint, And stop investigating my abyss? But all at once it dawned on me that this Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; Just this: not text, but texture; not the dream But topsy-turvical coincidence, 810 Not flimsy nonsense, but a web of sense.

Now I shall spy on beauty as none has Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as None has cried out. Now I shall try what none Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done. And speaking of this wonderful machine: 840 I’m puzzled by the difference between Two methods of composing: A, the kind Which goes on solely in the poet’s mind, A testing of performing words, while he Is soaping a third time one leg, and B, The other kind, much more decorous, when He’s in his study writing with a pen.

In penless work there is no pen-poised pause And one must use three hands at the same time, Having to choose the necessary rhyme, Hold the completed line before one’s eyes, And keep in mind all the preceding tries?

My best time is the morning; my preferred Season, midsummer. I once overheard Myself awakening while half of me Still slept in bed. I tore my spirit free, And caught up with myself—upon the lawn Where clover leaves cupped the topaz of dawn, And where Shade stood in nightshirt and one shoe. 880 And then I realized that this half too Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke Safe in my bed as day its eggshell broke, And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay!

Your modern architect Is in collusion with psychanalysts: When planning parents’ bedrooms, he insists On lockless doors so that, when looking back, The future patient of the future quack May find, all set for him, the Primal Scene.

The empty little swing that swings Under the tree: these are the things That break my heart.

Solitude is the playfield of Satan. I cannot describe the depths of my loneliness and distress.

I suppose it was then, on those masquerading spring nights with the sounds of new life in the trees cruelly mimicking the cracklings of old death in my brain, I suppose it was then, on those dreadful nights, that I got used to consulting the windows of my neighbor’s house in the hope for a gleam of comfort

I think there must exist a special subversive group of pseudo-cupids—plump hairless little devils whom Satan commissions to make disgusting mischief in sacrosanct places.