The Real Life of Sebastian Knight   ::   Набоков Владимир Владимирович

'No,' answered the Englishman, 'toothache. I've had it all the way.' Half a dozen letters were found scattered in a field: remnants of the air-mail bag. Two of these were business letters of great importance; a third was addressed to a woman, but began: 'Dear Mr Mortimer, in reply to yours of the 6th inst…' and dealt with the placing of an order; a fourth was a birthday greeting; a fifth was the letter of a spy with its steely secret hidden in a haystack of idle prattle; and the last was an envelope directed to a firm of traders with the wrong letter inside, a love letter. 'This will smart, my poor love. Our picnic is finished; the dark road is bumpy and the smallest child in the car is about to be sick. A cheap fool would tell you: you must be brave. But then, anything I might tell you in the way of support or consolation is sure to be milk-puddingy – you know what I mean. You always knew what I meant. Life with you was lovely – and when I say lovely, I mean doves and lilies, and velvet, and that soft pink "v" in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, lingering "l". Our life together was alliterative, and when I think of all the little things which will die, now that we cannot share them, I feel as if we were dead too. And perhaps we are. You see, the greater our happiness was, the hazier its edges grew, as if its outlines were melting, and now it has dissolved altogether. I have not stopped loving you; but something is dead in me, and I cannot see you in the mist…. This is all poetry. I am lying to you. Lily-livered. There can be nothing more cowardly than a poet beating about the bush. I think you have guessed how things stand: the damned formula of "another woman". I am desperately unhappy with her – here is one thing which is true. And I think there is nothing much more to be said about that side of the business.

'I cannot help feeling there is something essentially wrong about love. Friends may quarrel or drift apart, close relations too, but there is not this pang, this pathos, this fatality which clings to love. Friendship never has that doomed look. Why, what is the matter? I have not stopped loving you, but because I cannot go on kissing your dim dear race, we must part, we must part. Why is it so? What is this mysterious exclusiveness? One may have a thousand friends, but only one love-mate. Harems have nothing to do with this matter: I am speaking of dance, not gymnastics. Or can one imagine a tremendous Turk loving every one of his four hundred wives as I love you? For if I say "two" I have started to count and there is no end to it. There is only one real number: One.