Lolita

“offensive” is frequently but a synonym for “unusual;”

at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each
other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have
been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each
other’s soul and flesh; but there we were, unable even to mate as slum children would
have so easily found an opportunity to do.

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?

There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time
to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its
slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would
start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger chil-
dren granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incom-
plete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of
exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each
other, could bring relief.

Frulen von Kulp
may turn, her hand upon the door;
I will not follow her. Nor Fresca. Nor
that Gull.

my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence

I was born in 1910 , in Paris .

And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book.