The elms and the poplars were turning their ruffled backs to a sudden onslaught of wind, and a black thunderhead loomed above Ramsdale's white church… - Vladimir Nabokov

What is this jest in majesty? This ass in passion? How do God and Devil combine to form a live dog?

My sweetheart, my love, my love, my love — do you know what — all the happiness of the world, the riches, power and adventures, all the promises of religions, all the enchantment of nature and even human fame are not worth your two letters. It was a night of horror, terrible anguish, when I imagined that your undelivered letter, stuck at some unknown post office, was being destroyed like a sick little stray dog . . . But today it arrived — and now it seems to me that in the mailbox where it was lying, in the sack where it was shaking, all the other letters absorbed, just by touching it, your unique charm and that that day all Germans received strange wonderful letters — letters that had gone mad because they had touched your handwriting. The thought that you exist is so divinely blissful in itself that it is ridiculous to talk about the everyday sadness of separation — a week’s, ten days’ — what does it matter? since my whole life belongs to you. I wake at night and know that you are together with me, — I sense your sweet long legs, your neck through your hair, your trembling eyelashes — and then such happiness, such simmering bliss follows me in my dreams that I simply suffocate . . .

With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a grey neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.