Владимир Набоков: The original of Laura

I have never derived the least joy from my legs. In tact I strongly object to the bipedal condition. The ratter and wiser I grew the more I abominated the task of grappling with long drawers, trousers and pyjama pants. Had I been able to bear the stink and stickiness of my own unwashed body I would have slept with all my clothes on and had valets — preferably with some experience in the tailoring of corpses — change me, say, once a week.

But then, I also loath the proximity of valets and the vile touch of their hands. The last one I had was at least clean but he regarded the act of dressing his master as a battle of wits, he doing his best to turn the wrong outside into the right inside and I undoing his endeavors by working my right foot into my left trouser leg. Our complicated exertions, which to an onlooker might have seemed some sort of exotic wrestling match, would lake us from one room to another and end by my sitting on the floor, exhausted and hot, with the bottom of my trousers mis-clothing my heaving abdomen.

Finally, in my sixties, T found the right person to dress and undress me: an old illusionist who is able to go behind a screen in the guise of a cossack and instantly come out at the other end as Uncle Sam. He is tasteless and rude, and altogether not a nice person, but he has taught me many a subtle trick such as folding trousers properly and I think I shall keep him despite the fantastic wages the rascal asks.

Every now and then she would turn up for a few moments between trains, between planes, between lovers. My morning sleep would be interrupted by heartrending sounds — a window opening, a little bustle downstairs, a trunk coming, a trunk going, distant telephone conversation that seemed to be conducted in conspiratorial whispers. If shivering in my nightshirt I dared to waylay her all she said would be "you really ought to lose some weight" or "I hope you transferred that money as I indicated" — and all doors closed again.

"Nietzsche argued that the man of pure will… must recognize that the there is an appropriate lime to die"

Philip Nikitin:

The act of suicide maybe "criminal" in the same sense that murder is criminal but in my case it is purified and hallowed by the incredible delight it gives.

By now I have died up to my navel some fifty times in less than three years and my fifty resurrections have shown that no damage is done to the organs involved when breaking in time out of the trance. As soon as I started yesterday to work on my torso, the act of deletion produced an ecstasy superior to anything experienced before; yet I noticed that the ecstasy was accompanied by a new feeling of anxiety and even panic.

How curious to recall the trouble I had in finding an adequate spot for my first experiments. There was an old swing hanging from a branch of an old oak tree in a corner of the garden. Its ropes looked sturdy enough; its seat was provided with a comfortable safety bar of the kind inherited nowadays by chair lifts. It had been much used years ago by my half sister, a fat dreamy pigtailed creature who died before reaching puberty. I now had to take a ladder to it, for the sentimental relic was lifted out of human reach by the growth of the picturesque but completely indifferent tree. I had glided with a slight oscillation into the initial stage of a particularly rich trance when the cordage burst and I was hurled, still more or less boxed, into a ditch full of brambles which ripped off a piece of the peacock blue dressing gown I happened to be wearing that summer day.

Thinking away oneself a melting sensation

An envahissement of delicious dissolution (what a miraculous appropriate noun!)

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Aftereffect of certain drug used by anesthesiologist I have never been much interested in navel