Strange thoughts tonight about reading the enduring novels, the best loved, the most progressive, the products of writers who excelled in language use and the audacity to write an oft-told tale in a new way to find a path that curdles through the reader’s mind to leave new understandings. And to read them back to back, to take from one to give to another; each then being changed.
Nabokov makes us uncomfortable with Humbert Humbert, yet we must read on. Kittenish Lolita hasn’t developed yet–as a woman or as a character and maybe we look to Humbert to bring her out. But what are we thinking? Can we be cheering him on? What evil within us rallies behind him?
Does man learn and change, or do we adjust as a society, so that there is no place to reach that hasn’t always been there. Just a different path. And if nothing truly changes, if perfection for mankind is not a reality and never will be, why would there be a heaven to which a soul would strive? Perhaps there is nothing. It just happens over and over again to different people. The history of mankind may be the longest running play on the stage of earth with the dramatic touches of different directors, new actors.
I am asking questions of myself, of Nabokov, and even more so lately, of whoever or whatever it is we call God.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology