Look at the harlequins! [...] All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together — jokes… - Vladimir Nabokov

Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!

She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredible — and somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessary — fact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.

"My angel, oh my angel, perhaps our whole earthly existence is now but a pun to you, or a grotesque rhyme, something like "dental" and "transcendental" (remember?), and the true meaning of reality, of that piercing term, purged of all our strange, dreamy, masquerade interpretations, now sounds so pure and sweet that you, angel, find it amusing that we could have taken the dream so seriously (although you and I did have an inkling of why everything disintegrated at one furtive touch — words, conventions of everyday life, systems, persons — so, you know, I think laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world."

Remembrance, like Rembrandt, is dark but festive.