This, and much more, she accepted - for after all living did mean accepting the loss of one joy after another, not even joys in her case - mere possi… - Vladimir Nabokov

She thought (...) of the incalculable amount of tenderness contained in the world; of the fate of this tenderness, which is either crushed, or wasted, or transformed into madness; of neglected children humming to themselves in unswept corners; of beautiful weeds that cannot hide from the farmer and helplessly have to watch the shadow of his simian stoop leave mangled flowers in its wake, as the monstrous darkness approaches.

The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry — English, Russian and French — than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several — Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke — have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.

One mercifully hopes there are water nymphs in the Styx.