Read Online Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov - Free Book Online
Authors: Vladimir Nabokov
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the whole fiction of the serious, too serious writer who had been satirized in a recent novel.
In another no less ominous nocturnal experience, he would find himself trying to stop or divert a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a rift in the texture of space and being hampered in every conceivable respect by cobwebby, splintery, filamentary elements, confused heaps and hollows, brittle debris, collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and
that
was death. Less frightening but perhaps imperiling a person’s brain to an even greater extent were the “avalanche” nightmares at the rush of awakening when their imagery turned into the movement of verbal colluvia in the valleys of Toss and Thurn, whose gray rounded rocks,
Roches étonnées
, are so termed because of their puzzled and grinning surface, marked by dark “goggles”
(écarquillages)
. Dream-man is an idiot not wholly devoid of animal cunning; the fatal flaw in his mind corresponds to the splutter produced by tongue twisters: “the risks scoundrels take.”
He was told what a pity he had not seen his analyst as soon as the nightmares grew worse. He replied he did not own one. Very patiently the doctor rejoined that the pronoun had been used not possessively but domestically as, for example, in advertisements: “Ask your grocer.” Had Armande ever consulted an analyst? If that was a reference to Mrs. Person and not to a child or a cat, then the answer was no. As a girl she seemed to have been interested in Neobuddhism and that sort of stuff, but in America new friends urged her to get, what you call, analyzed and she said she might try it after completing her Oriental studies.
He was advised that in calling her by her first name onesimply meant to induce an informal atmosphere. One always did that. Only yesterday one had put another prisoner completely at ease by saying: You’d better tell Uncle your dreams or you might burn. Did Hugh, or rather Mr. Person, have “destructive urges” in his dreams—this was something that had not been made sufficiently clear. The term itself might not be sufficiently clear. A sculptor could sublimate the destructive urge by attacking an inanimate object with chisel and hammer. Major surgery offered one of the most useful means of draining off the destructive urge: a respected though not always lucky practitioner had admitted privately how difficult he found it to stop himself from hacking out every organ in sight during an operation. Everyone had secret tensions stored up from infancy. Hugh need not be ashamed of them. In fact at puberty sexual desire arises as a substitute for the desire to kill, which one normally fulfills in one’s dreams; and insomnia is merely the fear of becoming aware in sleep of one’s unconscious desires for slaughter and sex. About eighty percent of all dreams enjoyed by adult males are sexual. See Clarissa Dark’s findings—she investigated singlehanded some two hundred healthy jailbirds whose terms of imprisonment were shortened, of course, by the number of nights spent in the Center’s dormitory. Well, one hundred seventy-eight of the men were seen to have powerful erections during the stage of sleep called HAREM (“Has A Rapid Eye Movement”) marked by visions causing a lustful ophthalmic roll, a kind of internal ogling. By the way, when did Mr. Person begin to hate Mrs. Person? No answer. Was hate, maybe, part of his feeling for her from the very first moment? No answer. Did he ever buy her a turtleneck sweater? No answer. Was he annoyed when she found it too tight at the throat?
“I shall vomit,” said Hugh, “if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.”
17
We shall now discuss love.
What powerful words, what weapons, are stored up in the mountains, at suitable spots, in special caches of the granite heart, behind painted surfaces of steel made to resemble the mottling of the adjacent rocks! But when moved to express his love, in the
In another no less ominous nocturnal experience, he would find himself trying to stop or divert a trickle of grain or fine gravel from a rift in the texture of space and being hampered in every conceivable respect by cobwebby, splintery, filamentary elements, confused heaps and hollows, brittle debris, collapsing colossuses. He was finally blocked by masses of rubbish, and
that
was death. Less frightening but perhaps imperiling a person’s brain to an even greater extent were the “avalanche” nightmares at the rush of awakening when their imagery turned into the movement of verbal colluvia in the valleys of Toss and Thurn, whose gray rounded rocks,
Roches étonnées
, are so termed because of their puzzled and grinning surface, marked by dark “goggles”
(écarquillages)
. Dream-man is an idiot not wholly devoid of animal cunning; the fatal flaw in his mind corresponds to the splutter produced by tongue twisters: “the risks scoundrels take.”
He was told what a pity he had not seen his analyst as soon as the nightmares grew worse. He replied he did not own one. Very patiently the doctor rejoined that the pronoun had been used not possessively but domestically as, for example, in advertisements: “Ask your grocer.” Had Armande ever consulted an analyst? If that was a reference to Mrs. Person and not to a child or a cat, then the answer was no. As a girl she seemed to have been interested in Neobuddhism and that sort of stuff, but in America new friends urged her to get, what you call, analyzed and she said she might try it after completing her Oriental studies.
He was advised that in calling her by her first name onesimply meant to induce an informal atmosphere. One always did that. Only yesterday one had put another prisoner completely at ease by saying: You’d better tell Uncle your dreams or you might burn. Did Hugh, or rather Mr. Person, have “destructive urges” in his dreams—this was something that had not been made sufficiently clear. The term itself might not be sufficiently clear. A sculptor could sublimate the destructive urge by attacking an inanimate object with chisel and hammer. Major surgery offered one of the most useful means of draining off the destructive urge: a respected though not always lucky practitioner had admitted privately how difficult he found it to stop himself from hacking out every organ in sight during an operation. Everyone had secret tensions stored up from infancy. Hugh need not be ashamed of them. In fact at puberty sexual desire arises as a substitute for the desire to kill, which one normally fulfills in one’s dreams; and insomnia is merely the fear of becoming aware in sleep of one’s unconscious desires for slaughter and sex. About eighty percent of all dreams enjoyed by adult males are sexual. See Clarissa Dark’s findings—she investigated singlehanded some two hundred healthy jailbirds whose terms of imprisonment were shortened, of course, by the number of nights spent in the Center’s dormitory. Well, one hundred seventy-eight of the men were seen to have powerful erections during the stage of sleep called HAREM (“Has A Rapid Eye Movement”) marked by visions causing a lustful ophthalmic roll, a kind of internal ogling. By the way, when did Mr. Person begin to hate Mrs. Person? No answer. Was hate, maybe, part of his feeling for her from the very first moment? No answer. Did he ever buy her a turtleneck sweater? No answer. Was he annoyed when she found it too tight at the throat?
“I shall vomit,” said Hugh, “if you persist in pestering me with all that odious rot.”
17
We shall now discuss love.
What powerful words, what weapons, are stored up in the mountains, at suitable spots, in special caches of the granite heart, behind painted surfaces of steel made to resemble the mottling of the adjacent rocks! But when moved to express his love, in the
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