Владимир Набоков - The original of Laura

And all of this goes with self-destruction segment.

Electroencephalographs recordings of hypnotic "sleep" are very similar to those of the waking state and quite different from those of normal sleep; yet there are certain minute details about the pattern of the trance which are of extraordinary interest and place it specifically apart from both sleep and

As I destroyed my thorax, I also destroyed [] and the [] and the laughing people in theaters with a no longer visible stage or screen, and the [] and the [] in the cemetery of the asymmetrical heart

A process of self-obliteration conducted by an effort of the will. Pleasure, bordering on almost unendurable ecstasy, comes from feeling the will working at a new task: an act of destruction which develops paradoxically an element of creativeness in the totally new application of totally free will. Learning to use the vigor of the body lor the purpose of its own deletion, standing vitality on its head.

Nirvana blowing out [extinguishing], extinction, disappearance. In Buddhist theology extinction… and absorption into the supreme spirit, [nirvanic embrace of Brahma] bonze = Buddhist monk bonzery, bonzeries the doctrine of Buddhist incarnation Brahmahood = absorption into the divine essence.

Brahmism

Buddhism

Nirvana = "extinction of the self" "individual existence" "release from the cycle of incarnations" "reunion with Brahma (Hinduism) attained through the suppression of individual existence" Buddhism: Beatic spiritual condition The religious rubbish and mysticism of Oriental wisdom. The minor poetry of mystical myths

The novel Laura was sent to me by the painter Rawitch, a rejected admirer of my wife, of whom he did an exquisite oil a few years ago. The way I was led by delicate clues and ghostly nudges to the exhibition where "Lady with Fan" was sold to me by his girlfriend, a sniggering tart with gilt fingernails, is a separate anecdote in the anthology of humiliation to which, since my marriage, I have been a constant contributor. As to the book, a bestseller, which the blurb described as "a roman a clef with the clef lost for ever," the demonic hands of one of my servants, the Velvet Valet as Flora called him, kept slipping it into my visual field until I opened the damned thing and discovered it to be a maddening masterpiece.

Winny Carr, waiting tor her train on the station platform of Sex, a delightful Swiss resort famed for its crimson plums, noticed her old friend Flora on a bench near the bookstall with a paperback in her lap. This was lhe soft cover copy of Laura issued virtually al the same time as its much stouter and comelier hardback edition. She had just bought it at the station bookstall and in answer to Winny's jocular remark ("hope you'll enjoy the story of your life") said she doubted if she could force herself to start reading it. Oh you must! said Winnie. It is, of course, fictionalized and all that, but you'll come face to face with yourself at every other corner. And there's your wonderful death. Let me show you your wonderful death. Damn, here's my train. Are we going together? "I'm not going anywhere. I'm expecting somebody. Nothing very exciting. Please let me have my book." "Oh, but I simply must find that passage for you. It's not quite at the end. You'll scream with laughter. It's the craziest death in the world." "You'll miss your train," said Flora.

Philip Wild spent most of the afternoon in the shade of a marbrosa tree (that he vaguely mistook for an opulent tropical race of the birch) sipping tea with lemon and making embryonic notes with a diminutive pencil attached to diminutive agenda book which seemed to melt into his broad moist palm where it would spread in sporadic crucifixions. He sat with widespread legs to accommodate his enormous stomach and now and then checked or made in midthought half a movement to check the fly buttons of his old fashioned white trousers. There was also the recurrent search for his pencil sharpener, which he absently put into a different pocket every time after use. Otherwise, between all those small movements, he sat perfectly still, like a meditative idol. Flora would be often present lolling in a deckchair, moving it from time to lime, circling as it were around her husband, and enclosing his chair in her progression of strewn magazines as she sought an even denser shade than the one sheltering him. The urge to expose the maximum of naked flesh permitted by fashion was combined in her strange little mind with a dread of the least touch of tan defiling her ivory skin. To all contraceptive precautions, and indeed to orgasms at its safest and deepest, I much preferred — madly preferred — finishing off at my ease against lhe softest part of her Ihigh. 'I his predilection might have been due to the unforgettable impact of my romps with schoolmates of different, but erotically identical, sexes.

he too had needed and that he would come to stay for for at least a week every other month

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This [?] for a Theme Begin with [poem] etc and finish with mast, and Flora, [ascribe to (?)] picture

After a three-year separation (distant war, regular exchange of lender letters) we met again. Though still married to that hog she kept away from him and at the moment sojourned at a central European resort in eccentric solitude. We met in a splendid park that she praised with exaggerated warmth — picturesque trees, blooming meadows — and in a secluded part of it an ancient "rotonda" with pictures and music where we simply had to stop for a rest and a bite — the sisters, I mean, she said, the attendants there — served iced coffee and cherry tart of quite special quality — and as she spoke I suddenly began to realize with a sense of utter depression and embarrassment that the "pavillion" was the celebrated Green Chapel of St. Esmeralda and that she was brimming with religious fervor and yet miserably, desperately fearful, despite bright smiles and un air enjou? of my insulting her by some mocking remark.

[The grey wall did not go up to the ceiling, but slopped at the magenta horizon of its own painted verge, where the reverse slope of the white washed ceiling used to begin.] I hit upon the art of thinking away my body, my being, mind itself. To think away thought — luxurious suicide, delicious dissolution! Dissolution, in fact, is a marvelously apt term here; for as you sit relaxed in this comfortable chair (narrator striking its armrests) and star! destroying yourself, the first thing you feel is a mounting melting from the feet upward.

In experimenting on oneself in order to pick out the sweetest death, one cannot, obviously, set part of one's body on fire or drain it of blood or subject it to any other drastic operation, for the simple reason that these are one-way treatments: there is no resurrecting the organ one has destroyed. It is the ability to stop the experiment and return intact from the perilous journey that makes all the difference, once its mysterious technique has been mastered by the student of self-annihilation. From the preceding chapters and the footnotes to them, he has learned, I hope, how to put himself into neutral, i.e. into a harmless trance and how to get out of it by a resolute wrench of the watchful will. What cannot be taught is the specific method of dissolving one's body, or at least part of one's body, while tranced. A deep probe of one's darkest self, the unraveling of subjective associations, may suddenly lead to the shadow of a clue and then to the clue itself. The only help I can provide is not even paradigmatic. For all I know, the way I found to woo death may be quite atypical; yet the story has to be told for the sake of its strange logic. In a recurrent dream of my childhood I used to see a smudge on the wallpaper or on a whitewashed door, a nasty smudge that started to come alive, turning into a crustacean-like monster. As its appendages began to move, a thrill of foolish horror shook me awake; but the same night or the next I would be again facing idly some wall or screen on which a spot of dirt would attract the naive sleeper's attention by starting to grow and make groping and clasping gestures — and again I managed to wake up bet?re bloated bulk got unstuck from the wall. But one night when some trick of position, some dimple of pillow, some fold of bed clothes made me feel brighter and braver than usual, I let the smudge start its evolution and, drawing on an imagined matter, I simply-rubbed out the beast. Three or four times it appeared again in my dreams but now I welcomed its growing shape and gleefully erased it. Finally it gave up — as some day life will give up — bothering me.