-
according to one's own thoughts rather than in some broader, more social form.
-
But abruptly, fiendishly,
-
the tender pattern of nudity I had adored
-
would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes
-
reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night.
-
So, the object of this wonderful aesthetic reverie,
-
the nymphet, turns out to be an adult male.
-
And I just want you to ask yourself why that could be.
-
But, Nabokov's relationship to this modernist past
-
is not just the burlesque that he visits on Eliot,
-
is not just this complicated attraction and dis-identification
-
that he works on with Proust.