Invitation to a Beheading

by Vladimir Nabokov

Everything has duped me as it fell into place, everything. This is the dead end of this life, and I should not have sought salvation within its confines. It is strange that I should have sought salvation. Just like a man grieving because he has recently lost in his dreams something that he had never had in reality, or hoping that tomorrow he would dream that he found it again.

I have discovered it. I have discovered the little crack in life, here it broke off, where it had once been soldered to something else, something genuinely alive, important and vast – how capacious my epithets must be in order that I may pour them full of crystalline sense … it is best to leave some things unsaid, or else I shall get confused again. Within this irreparable little crack decay has set in – ah, I think I shall yet be able to express it all – the dreams, the coalescence, the disintegration – no, again I am off the track – all my best words are deserters and do not answer the trumpet call, and the remainder are cripples.

twirling the stunted pencil in his fingers, he paused in thought, and a little brown fuzz had stuck to the edge of the table where the moth had quivered only a short time ago, and Cincinnatus, remembering it, walked away from the table, leaving on it the blank sheet with only the one solitary word on it, and that one crossed out, and bent down (pretending that he was fixing the back of his slipper) by the cot, on whose iron leg, quite near the floor, it was settled, asleep, its visionary wings spread in solemn invulnerable torpor;

only he was sorry for the downy back where the fuzz had rubbed off leaving a bald spot, as shiny as a chestnut – but the great dark wings, with their ashen edges and perpetually open eyes, were inviolable – the forewings, lowered, slightly lapped over the hind ones, and this drooping attitude might have been one of somnolent fragility, were it not for the monolithic straightness of the upper margins and the perfect symmetry of all the diverging lines – and this was so enchanting that Cincinnatus, unable to restrain himself, stroked with his fingertip the hoary ridge near the base of the right wing, then the ridge of the left one (what gentle firmness! what unyielding gentleness!);