"... what pleases me is the evolution of the match theme...the following of such thematic designs through one's life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography." (page 27)

"... in a way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum - the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate - and this proved a splendid training for the endurance of later losses. Her [ VN's mother] special tags and imprints became as dear and as sacred to me as they were to her." ( page 40)

"I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some trasured item of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it. Although it lingered on in my mind, its personal warmth, its retrospective appeal had gone...into the description of a childhood entirely unrelated to my own." (page 95)

Probably VN's opposition to Freud derives from something special and which I don't think has been mentioned before. In my view much of what lies in VN's images and their eery appeal derives from his exploitation of art as a form of paramnesia.

The veil that "paramnesia" ( or "screen memory") casts on a real event is particularly effective and the false pictures it creates to substitute for a "real" recollection, are multicolored bubbles sustained by highly charged psychic investments. If, as it happens during a psychoanalytic interpretation, the veil is lifted, the burst bubbles simply reveal a drab painful event and intense recollections hiding behind poetic metaphors would then stop their endless derivation and metamorphosis!

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