A friend of mine shared this brief discussion of Lolita, written by Natalia Anotonova, a survivor of pedophiliac sexual abuse. A choice excerpt:

Here, Nabokov does more than write about a self-contained world of horror in a beautiful way. He also presents a curious way in which the human mind can experience that world of horror. One of the things that always bothered me most was how my awful recollections could come back to me in exquisite wrapping: how I could recall overripe apples thumping to the ground in the night, a shooting star, or Bach being played on the piano in an adjacent room. In attempting to make sense of what happened to me, I seized on those moments as “evidence” of the fact that I “liked” what had occurred. If I could focus on the loveliness of Prelude No. 1 in C Major as something disgusting and illegal was going on, wasn’t I just reveling in that which was disgusting and illegal? I punished myself for a way of thinking that, reading Lolita, was revealed to me as a survival tactic. I realized, for the first time, that there was nothing wrong or strange with how I had been coping, by stepping out of the horror and into the beauty that was running parallel to it.

One problem of telling a story, any story, real or imagined, is the problem of angles. Is there a correct one? And does anyone have the right to marvel at the one that shows the glistening, freshly raped Lolita with her vacant eyes? Before Nabokov, I never really noticed how the world doesn’t bend to the horror of our individual experiences, it just carries on being the world. I would chew away at myself, because I couldn’t divorce something sickening from something that was still very much life, into which light shone occasionally, even when it was only neon. Lolita is a reminder that beauty neither de-claws nor lulls evil, it just exists, and might as well be accepted since it isn’t going anywhere.

Humbert’s terrifying, self-justifying brilliance is a relief in its own right, because it’s hard to admit that you tried to save yourself and failed. But it helps to realize what you were up against. How could have Lolita, no matter how smart-mouthed and full of bravado, outwitted Humbert? How could I have outwitted He Who Spectacularly Betrayed? The illusion that I could have done a thing to save myself — and hence was guilty, since I obviously hadn’t tried hard enough — was impossible to maintain after contemplating the merciless talent of a person like Humbert, how easily he got the girl where he wanted her to be, how effortlessly he rationalized his actions, how magnificently he described his odyssey and tied it up with a pretty bow.

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I think something we all admire about Lolita is how terrifyingly beautiful (or beautifully terrifying?) the book is. I haven't read it in a few years but I do remember a sort of rosy glow draped over the whole thing, infusing every word, even as so many horrific events transpired (I think the newer film captured this atmosphere well by using a light, softening filter and choosing actors with subtle but lovely features). But the idea of beauty running parallel to horror is compelling, as if beauty does not infuse horror but exists somewhere at its edge: something into which you can step and bask in spite of the horror. In that case I might use the word "peripheral," or even "orbiting" (the image conceived is of a bright, crisp apple with a dark spot near the center: you may consume the surrounding beauty despite the rot, which can be isolated but not ignored? Something like that?). Or maybe even "centripetal": as if the beauty of the world is in motion, surrounds the core of the horrible event and attempts to penetrate it. But "parallel"? I'm imagining a stretch of treacherously gnarled woodland and a moonlit stream running through it: step from the dangerous dark into the stream, wade your mind in the water. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that word choice. Of course this has more to do with the way an individual mind regards and conceptualizes abstractions such as beauty (and horror) than anything, and how the individual mind attempts to render them palpable; it's incredibly personal. Regardless I think it's illuminating to hear an abuse survivor talk about Lolita as a book that saved her -- that helped her handle the complexity of her unique situation -- because one would typically expect such a book to further traumatize, given that in many ways it asks readers to empathize with a child rapist. Still: in the end, empathy does not negate what's happened; Nabokov never asks us to forgive or excuse Humbert's actions, nor does he implicate Lolita as the "little whore," and those are important distinctions to make. It is culture that has turned the terms "Lolita" and "nymphet" into condemnatory ones that appeal to rape apologists and misogynists.

Anyway. Here is a quote from a 1964 interview with Nabokov from Playboy I particularly love, as it explains the generation of the various names given to our heroine:

For my nymphet I needed a diminutive with a lyrical lilt to it. One of the most limpid and luminous letters is "L". The suffix "-ita" has a lot of Latin tenderness, and this I required too. Hence: Lolita. However, it should not be pronounced as you and most Americans pronounce it: Low-lee-ta, with a heavy, clammy "L" and a long "o". No, the first syllable should be as in "lollipop", the "L" liquid and delicate, the "lee" not too sharp. Spaniards and Italians pronounce it, of course, with exactly the necessary note of archness and caress. Another consideration was the welcome murmur of its source name, the fountain name: those roses and tears in "Dolores." My little girl's heartrending fate had to be taken into account together with the cuteness and limpidity. Dolores also provided her with another, plainer, more familiar and infantile diminutive: Dolly, which went nicely with the surname "Haze," where Irish mists blend with a German bunny -- 1 mean, a small German hare.

"What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira's image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . . never to remember Mira Belochkin--not because . . . the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget--because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past."

--Nabokov, Pnin

"In the end one loves one's desire and not what is desired."

--Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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the only rendition of this book worth watching!

For many reasons, Christmas seems a bit pointless at this juncture in my life. But at least it gives me an excuse to watch this movie:



Can you forgive a pigheaded old fool for having no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, all these years?

Gerard Manley Hopkins!

(Carrion Comfort)

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me
Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,
Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

the lovely, lovely opening to LIGHT YEARS by James Salter

One

WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.

The day is white as paper. The windows are chilled. The quarries lie empty, the silver mine drowned. The Hudson is vast here, vast and unmoving. A dark country, a country of sturgeon and carp. In the fall it was silver with shad. The geese flew overhead in their long, shifting V's. The tide flows in from the sea.

The Indians sought, they say, a river that "ran both ways." Here they found it. The salt wedge penetrates as far in as fifty miles; sometimes it reaches Poughkeepsie. There were huge beds of oysters here, seals in the harbor, in the woods inexhaustible game. This great glacial cut with its nuptial bays, the coves of wild celery and rice, this majestic river. The birds, like punctuation, are crossing in level flight. They seem to approach slowly, accelerate, pass overhead like arrows. The sky has no color. A feeling of rain.

All this was Dutch. Then, like so much else, it was English. The river is a reflection. It bears only silence, a glittering cold. The trees are naked. The eels sleep. The channel is deep enough for ocean liners; they could, if they wished, astonish the inner towns. There are turtles and crabsin the marshes, herons, Bonaparte gulls. The sewage pours from the cities further up. The river is filthy, but cleanses itself. The fish are numbed; they drift with the tide.

Along the banks there are houses of stone, no longer fashionable, and wooden houses, drafty and bare. There are still estates that exist, remnants of the great land parcels of the past. Near the water, a large Victorian, the brick painted white, trees high above it, a walled garden, a decaying greenhouse with ironwork along the roof. A house by the river, too low for the afternoon sun. It was flooded instead with the light of morning, with the eastern light. It was in glory at noon. There are spots where the paint has turned dark, bare spots. The gravel paths are dissolving; birds nest in the sheds.

We strolled in the garden, eating the small, bitter apples. The trees were dry and gnarled. The lights in the kitchen were on.

A car comes up the driveway, back from the city. The driver goes inside, only for a moment until he's heard the news: the pony has gotten loose.

He is furious. "Where is she? Who left the door unlatched?"

"Oh God, Viri. I don't know."

In a room with many plants, a kind of solarium, there is a lizard, a brown snake, a box turtle asleep. The entry step is deep, the turtle cannot leave. He sleeps on the gravel, his feet drawn up close. His nails are the color of ivory, they curl, they are long. The snake sleeps, the lizard sleeps.

Viri has his coat collar up and is trudging uphill. "Ursula!" he calls. He whistles.

The light has gone. The grass is dry; it creaks underfoot. There was no sun all day. Calling the pony's name, he advances toward the far corners, the road, the adjoining fields. A stillness everywhere. It begins to rain. He sees the one-eyed dog that belongs to a neighbor, a kind of husky, his muzzle gray. The eye is closed completely, sealed, covered with fur so long ago was it lost, as if it never existed.

"Ursula!" he cries.

"She's here," his wife says when he returns.

The pony is near the kitchen door, tranquil, dark, eating an apple. He touches her lips. She bites him absent-mindedly on the wrist. Her eyes are black, lustrous, with the long, crazy lashes of a drunken woman. Her coat is thick, her breath very sweet.

"Ursula," he says. Her ears turn slightly, then forget. "Where have you been? Who unlocked your stall?"

She has no interest in him.

"Have you learned to do that?" He touches an ear; it is warm, strong as a shoe. He leads her to the shed, whose door is ajar. Outside the kitchen he stamps dirt from his shoes.

The lights are on everywhere: a vast, illuminated house. Dead flies the size of beans lie behind the velvet curtains, the wallpaper has corner bulges, the window glass distorts. It is an aviary they live in, a honeycomb. The roofs are thick slate, the rooms are like shops. It gives off no sound, this house; in the darkness it is like a ship. Within, if one listens, there is everything: water, faint voices, the slow, measured rending of grain.

In the principal bath, with its stains, sponges, soaps the color of tea, books, water-curled copies of Vogue, he steams in peace. The water is above his knees; it penetrates to the bone. There is carpeting on the floor, a basket of smooth stones, an empty glass of the deepest blue.

"Papa," they call through the door.

"Yes." He is reading the Times.

"Where was Ursula?"

"Ursula?"

"Where was she?"

"I don't know," he says. "She went out for a walk."

They wait for something further. He is a storyteller, a man of wonders. They listen for sounds, expecting the door to open.

"But where was she?"

"Her legs were wet," he announces.

"Her legs?"

"I think she was swimming."

"No, Daddy, really."

"She was trying to get the onions on the bottom."

"There are no onions there."

"Oh, yes."

"There are?"

"That's where they grow."

They explain it to each other outside the door. It's true, they decide. They wait for him, two little girls squatting like beggars.

"Papa, come out," they say. "We want to talk to you."

He puts aside the paper and sinks one last time into the embrace of the bath.

"Papa?"

"Yes."

"Are you coming out?"

The pony fascinates them. It frightens them. They are ready to run if it makes an unexpected sound. Patient, silent, it stands in its stall; a grazing animal, it eats for hours. Its muzzle has a nimbus of fine hair, its teeth are browned.

"Their teeth never stop growing," the man who sold her to them said. He was a drunkard, his clothes were torn. "They keep growing out and getting wore down."

"What would happen if she didn't eat?"

"If she didn't eat?"

"What would happen to her teeth?"

"Make sure she eats," he said.

They often watch her; they listen to her jaws. This mythical beast, fragrant in the darkness, is greater than they are, stronger, more clever. They long to approach her, to win her love.

“If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up.”

--Camus, from "The Myth of Sisyphus"