happily drunk off of nabokov's words

while reading, "the real life of sebastian knight" by vladimir nabokov this morning i found a couple of pages that i thought were so fantastic they needed to be blogged. it's long, but worth it for hopeless romantics. i especially love the "penny" and "forget me now" parts.

the following is a love letter from a man to a woman, lost among other air mail pieces that were scattered across a field after a plane crash in england:

"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 lillies, and velvet, and that soft pink 'v' in the middle and the way your tongue curved up to the long, longering '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 face, 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. And love, apparently, is the best exponent of this singularity.

"Good-bye, my poor love. I shall never forget you and never replace you. It would be absurd of me to try and persuade you that you were the pure love, and that this other passion is but a comedy in the flesh. All is flesh and all is purity. But one thing is certain: I have been happy with you and now I am miserable with another. And so life will go on. I shall joke with the chaps at the office and enjoy my dinners (until I get dyspepsia), and read novels, and write verse, and keep an eye on the stocks - and generally behave as I have always behaved. But that does not mean that I shall be happy without you...Every small thing which will remind me of you - the look of disapproval about the furniture in the rooms where you have patted cushions and spoken to the poker, every small thing which we have discried together - will always seem to me one half of a shell, one half of a penny, with the other half kept by you. Good-bye. Go away, go away. Don't write. Marry Charlie or any other good man with a pipe in his teeth. Forget me now, but remember me afterwards, when the bitter part is forgotten. This blot is not due to a tear. My fountain pen has broken down and I am using a filthy pen in this filthy hotel room. The heat is terrific and I have not been able to clinch the business I was supposed to bring 'to a satisfactory close,' as that ass Mortimer says. I think you have got a book or two of mine - but that is not really important. Please don't write. L."