This friendship was the more precious for its tenderness being intentionally concealed, especially when we were not alone, by that gruffness which stems from what can be termed the dignity of the heart.

SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny.

Now I shall speak of evil as none has Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz; The white-hosed moron torturing a black Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac; Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools; Music in supermarkets; swimming pools; Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx, 930 Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, fra

From the second story of my house the Shades’ living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare, and almost every evening I could see the poet’s slippered foot gently rocking. One inferred from it that he was sitting with a book in a low chair but one never managed to glimpse more

Help me, Will. Pale Fire. Paraphrased, this evidently means: Let me look in Shakespeare for something I might use for a title. And the find is “pale fire.” But in which of the Bard’s works did our poet cull it? My readers must make their own research. All I have with me is a tiny vest pocket edition of Timon of Athens—in Zemblan! It certainly conta

the day he had first told her he did not love her. That happened during a hopeless trip to Italy, in a lakeside hotel garden—roses, black araucarias, rusty, greenish hydrangeas—one cloudless evening with the mountains of the far shore swimming in a sunset haze and the lake all peach syrup regularly rippled with pale blue, and the captions of a news

I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art,

I’m ready to become a floweret Or a fat fly, but never, to forget.

“Speaking of novels,” I said, “you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossi