The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage International)

by Vladimir Nabokov

I remember your hands—elongated, pale hands with bluish veins.

Everything in the world is beautiful, but Man only recognizes beauty if he sees it either seldom or from afar.…

Black thunder, in the distance, swells in velvet folds. It bursts forth all around us. We rush headlong, as if awaiting a god. We are packed inside a glassy glitter. We gather momentum. We hurtle into a black chasm and speed with a hollow din far underground, hanging on to leather straps. With a pop the amber lamps are extinguished for an instant, during which flimsy globules burn with a hot light in the dark—the bulging eyes of demons, or perhaps our fellow passengers’ cigars.

Forgive me if I am incapable of weeping, of simple human weeping, but instead keep singing and running somewhere, clutching at whatever wings fly past, tall, disheveled, with a wave of suntan on my forehead. Forgive me. That’s how it must be.

The sunlight glides across my skin. My skin is covered with multicolored sparkles.

was flowing and slithering downward to the sea: another step and, in the distance, between some walls, loomed its compact sapphire brilliance.

beautiful

Yet how splendidly, how radiantly the world’s monotony is interrupted now and then by the book of a genius, a comet, a crime, or even simply by a single sleepless night. Our laws, though—our pulse, our digestion are firmly linked to the harmonious motion of the stars, and any attempt to disturb this regularity is punished, at worst by beheading, at best by a headache.

at worst a beheading, at best a headache

While not experiencing for months any hankering after a woman, the virginal dwarf would be beset now and then by sharp pangs of lone amorous anguish which went as suddenly as they came, and again, for a while, he would ignore the bare shoulders showing white beyond the velvet boundary of loges, as well as the little girl acrobats, or the Spanish dancer whose sleek thighs were revealed for a moment when the orange-red curly fluff of her nether flounces would whip up in the course of a rapid swirl. “What you need is a female dwarf,” said Shock pensively, producing with a familiar flick of finger and thumb a silver coin from the ear of the dwarf, whose little arm went up in a brushing-away curve as if chasing a fly.

An ever-increasing insistence. The figure 33—the theme of that dream—had got entangled with his unconscious, its curved claws like those of a bat, had got caught in his soul, and there was no way to unravel that subliminal snarl.

nabokov writes of rolling rock?

Should one regard religion (argued Graf, dallying in the deserted darkened pub where the chairs were already yawning and being put to bed on the tables)—religion, which covers the walls of life with sacred pictures—as something on the lines of that attempt to create a favorable setting (rather in the same way as, according to certain physicians, the photographs of professional babies, with nice, chubby cheeks, by adorning the bedroom of a pregnant woman act beneficially on the fruit of her womb)?