On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 12:28 AM, jansymello <
jansy@aetern.us> wrote:
Btw. remembering Quilty's Assyrian beard (
if it was Q's) - what do we make of Humbert Humbert's sentence, in
"Lolita"?
"Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that
whatever spiritual solace I might find[...] Unless it can be proven to me — to
me as I am now, today, with my heart and by beard, and my putrefaction — that
[...] unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a
joke)."
""Unless
it
can be proven to me - to me as I am now, today, with my heart
and my beard,
and my putrefaction - that in the infinite run
it does not matter
a jot that
a North-American girl named Dolores Haze has been deprived of her childhood
by
a maniac, unless
this can be proven (
and if it can,
then life is a joke),
I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy
and very
local palliative of articulate art".
I apologize, I have not followed the "beard" discussion, and will catch up when I have time. But one thing about HH's sentence it seems to me in my most recent reading of
Lolita, is that it is not convincing that this is what HH feels ("then life is a joke") and may be more what VN feels. I believe Jansy makes this point beautifully in her article "
LOLITA: FREUDIANS, KEEP OUT, PLEASE".
Barrie Karp
NYC