Sublime

The rest of his time he spent in a liturgy of habits that protected him from unhappiness. Every so often, on a windy day, he went to the lake and spent hours looking at it, because, drawn on the water, he seemed to see the inexplicable spectacle, light, that had been his life.

The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. This bracketed tragedy is an instant shorthand for Humbert’s sensibility: his ruthless irony and black humour, a flippancy whose source is an inscrutable mix of callousness and p

Niente/Nothing

Da quel giorno, tutte le volte che il sole si abbassa e si fa notte, aspetto una risposta da me stesso o da qualcun altro. Tutti i giorni. Sistematicamente, non arriva. Perché è infinita la commedia delle domande. E striminzita quella delle risposte. È sempre questa inesorabile sproporzione che determina l’invecchiamento di tutte le cellule. Questo

quixotic

Hitchcockian protagonist,

They were linked by a hypothetical umbilical cord. His mind floated in the amniotic fluid of memory, listening for echoes of the past.