Posted by Roger Boylan on Monday, February 7, 2011
John Updike famously said, "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." In my frequent moments of rereading Nabokov's thankfully-large oeuvre, I'm still arrested by passages I've already read a dozen or more times. Like Horowitz playing Chopin, no one does it better. Here's Professor Pnin in the eponymous novel sitting in the college library at Waindell (read: Cornell) at night:
"Doffing his spectacles, he rubbed with the knuckles of the hand that held them his naked and tired eyes and, still in thought, fixed his mild gaze on the window above where, gradually, through his dissolving meditation, there appeared the violet-blue air of dusk, silver-tooled by the reflection of the fluorescent lights of the ceiling, and, among spidery black twigs, a mirrored row of bright book spines." (p. 78, Vintage edition)
