I am ending the year in this unwarranted manner. A friend recently revealed that he is actually a romantic at heart, which is shocking considering he leads our little post-modern movement. For one of the few times, we do not share this popular identification. (Though this does not mean that I abhor romantic writers. Nabokov's Lolita, for instance, is a darling favorite and I have not even finished reading it yet.)
On a side note, I should say that people who write have this odd obsession with unrequited love. (Just something I noticed while rummaging through old selections.) They would prefer it over a love that is returned, I guess; although I do not speak for the entirety. It is a goldmine for poetic notions - where else can you find pain, longing, and love packaged into one economical idea box?
"Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns." - Ch. 1
"And so we rolled East, I more devastated than braced with the satisfaction of my passion, and she glowing with health, her bi-iliac garland still as brief as a lad's, although she had added two inches to her stature and eight pounds to her weight. We had been everywhere. We had really seen nothing. And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night — every night, every night — the moment I feigned sleep." - Ch. 8#
On a side note, I should say that people who write have this odd obsession with unrequited love. (Just something I noticed while rummaging through old selections.) They would prefer it over a love that is returned, I guess; although I do not speak for the entirety. It is a goldmine for poetic notions - where else can you find pain, longing, and love packaged into one economical idea box?