The Bard Reads Nab

My favorite chapter of Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading is chapter 8. It's superb.

"As far back as I can remember myself--and I remember myself with lawless lucidity, I have been my own accomplice, who knows too much, and therefore is dangerous."

"But then I have long since grown accustomed to the thought that what we call dreams is semi-reality, the promise of reality, a foreglimpse and a whiff of it; that is they contain, in a very vague, diluted state, more genuine reality than our vaunted waking life which, in its turn, is semi-sleep, an evil drowsiness into which penetrate in grotesque disguise the sounds and sights of the real world, flowing beyond the periphery of the mind--as when you hear during sleep a dreadful insidious tale because a branch is scraping on the pane, or see yourself sinking into snow because your blanket is sliding off."

"It exists, my dream world, it must exist, since, surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy."

"When still a child, living still in a canary-yellow, large, cold house where they were preparing me and hundreds of other children for secure nonexistence as adult dummies, into which all my coevals turned without effort or pain; already then, in those accursed days, amid rag books and brightly painted school materials and soul-chilling drafts, I knew without knowing, I knew without wonder, I knew as one knows oneself, I knew it even more clearly than I do now."