Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita

I efterordet till Lolita formulerar Nabokov kärnfullt vad romankonst handlar om:

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aestethic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

En av de scener i Lolita där detta extrapoleras starkast tycker jag (i likhet också med Nabokov) är när Humbert Humbert alldeles i slutet av romanen drar sig till minnes en episod från en av de otaliga bilfärderna med Dolly. Humbert Humbert har drabbats av åksjuka och stannat på en liten bergsväg. När han går fram mot kanten utspelar sig följande.

As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from from a small mining town that lay at my feet. [---] And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended vocies, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spur of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.

En bitterljuv episod, besläktad till exempel med den sublima scen i slutet av Brokeback mountain när Ennis efter många år minns omfamnandet av Jack en kväll vid elden i Wyoming, eller med de bästa stunderna i Agneta Pleijels roman Lord Nevermore. Ett i bästa mening Proustskt ögonblick.