I have to tread carefully. I have to speak in a whisper. Oh you, veteran crime reporter, you grave old usher, you once popular policeman, now in solitary confinement after gracing that school crossing for years, you wretched emeritus read to by a boy! It would never do, would it, to have you fellows fall madly in love with my Lolita! had I been a painter, had the management of The Enchanted Hunters lost its mind one summer day and commissioned me to redecorate their dining room with murals of my own making, this is what I might have thought up, let me list some fragments:
There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies, a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callipygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes.
Lolita Part I Chapter 30 by Vladmir Navokov in its entirety, one example where the most obscene was described without a word of profanity, where innuendos relies heavily on picturesque imagination rather than simple cerebral semantics, where Humbert’s paedophelia looms large behind his grandiosely paradisiacal depictions of an Enchanted Hunter’s mural.
Granted, the position of this chapter with respect to the whole book is also crucial, so go read the original.
