anyone who has actually taken the pains to read it. A great deal has also been written
about it; in my view not enough. What did the critics and scholars miss? It is hilarious -
'Does Common Sense Make Sense?' - and it is religious, a long meditation on the human
experience as lived by women. Happy Women's Day!
... That photograph
was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just
a few minutes before
we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate.
Under the flimsiest of
pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing
really mattered) we
escaped from the cafe to the beach, and found a
desolate stretch of sand,
and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks
forming a kind of cave,
had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody's
lost pair of
sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on
the point of
possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the
old man of the sea and his
brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of
ribald encouragement, and four
months later she died of typhus in Corfu.
4
I leaf again and again through these miserable
memories, and keep
asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that
remote summer, that the
rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for
that child only the
first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try
to analyze my own
cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender
to a sort of
retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic
faculty with boundless
alternatives and which causes each visualized route to
fork and re-fork
without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my
past. I am convinced,
however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita
began with Annabel.
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