I sometimes feel that my vision fails me. I have trouble reading road sings and small print, I see most everything but sometimes its just not as clear as it had ought to be. I see the same way when reading, I’ve read the story and I know what happens, but I know that beneath –sometimes above- the text there are torrents of rivers that I can’t seem to stay afloat on. In re-reading Lolita I am awed at how much emerges but dismayed on what gets past me. (I’m not bummed or anything. quite the opposite it’s just that this is such a wild story) Anyways there’s this one feed I keep catching on to but it continually escapes me. Like a fat trout I just can’t slay-out. This theme of myopia! It is peppered about the text. and I can’t seem to see it clearly... Anyway so myopia is nearsightedness and I can see why or how that is a thread in this text. Humbert is a man of action (drastic.) and does not seem to foresee problems arising. Humbert is aware of this strange(rs) presence but does not see distantly, he does not see Quilty. Humbert is in love with the foreground of womanhood, but as it recedes (proceeds?) into the future it becomes distorted and ugly and muddled, the only beautiful things he can see are at what we could consider the beginning. Humbert is in awe of Lolita’s beginning, her childhood. Even his relationship with her is along the same pattern, it starts in beauty an then fades to bleary misery. The greek for myopia means closed eye. Maybe Humbert is living in a world with his eyes closed, (perhaps recalling his past) [holy shit!: just thought of something as I was spellchecking this blog. check out below] Ok so these things are clear to me. But. I know that Nabokov is too good for something so simple like that, he is deliberate with his use of this term. The whole damned book is myopic, we at first see what’s at the foreground, what’s meant to be seen, but we are missing this depth by fathoms. We even start with part I which is exciting and sexual and enticing and readers eat that up. Part two is a little less clear and we get sort of muddled with what’s going on and whos whos and all this production that is being put on. Its confusing. Nearsighted. And I know that there is a whole other something beyond that’s even more obscured, the stuff I can see is only Nabokov’s foreground. You really need to read this book with glasses.

Chapter three page 11.

“Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half Dutch, in her case. I remembered her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as “honey-colored skin,” “thin arms,” “brown bobbed hair,” “long lashes,” “big bright mouth”); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).”