Dear List,
 
I am too shocked and sad right now to say anything but how much I will miss his sprightly, generous, candid, charming presence and how comforted I am to be part of a community that knows what this loss means.
 
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney

 
>>> Panayoti Kelaidis 02/23/12 6:32 PM >>>
Ten days ago I drove along Lake Leman and made the pilgrimage to the Clarens cemetery and was photographed next to that rather odd VN statue in front of the Montreux Palace Hotel (I wonder how many of us re-re-readers have gone through that bittersweet ritual over the years?). I drove right through Vevey going and coming, not even realizing that Dmitri might have been spending his last days there.
 
I regretted on previous trips as a young man passing through Switzerland that I never dropped by to pay my respects to VN, Years later, I likewise forwent the possibility of disturbing Vera... We good re-readers know that the physical, palpable presence would have probably been anticlimactic anyway, right?
 
I have a greater regret that when Dmitri came to Denver (where I live) in the centenary year of VN's birth, on the grand lecture tour, practically to my doorstep I could not go because of the timing of a family loss.
 
We are charmed and even thrilled (if ever so slightly envious) of those lucky enough to have had contact and conversations, proximity, even relationships with Vladimir, Vera or Dmitri.
 
But who on this List server does not know that all of us have access whenever we wish to that realm that we share at will with them, with one another, with the aurochs and angels?

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