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Couldn’t sleep at all, since at the numerous stations the wild jolts and thunderings of the train cars’ copulations and unlatchings allowed no rest.
I asked, in what seemed a rather pale voice….
He shaved me horribly, leaving my Adam’s apple all bristly….
… and two days ago rode with a woman professor and a group of very black young ladies, very intensely chewing mint gum, in a wooden charabanc-cum-automobile to collect insects about twenty miles from here.
Miss Read, the college head, is very pleasant, round, with a wart by her nostril, but very ideological….
It is very Southern here. I took a walk down the only big street in the velvet of the twilight and the azure of neon lamps, and came back, overcome by a Southern yawn.
I note, in the October 2-3, 1942, letter, written in Hartsville, South Carolina, the occurrence of “bliss” (“It is hard to convey the bliss of roaming through this strange bluish grass …”), a key word in Nabokov’s vast vocabulary, one that is central to the artistic credo that he stated fourteen years later in Lolita’s famous afterword (“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss…”).
My favorite sentence in the letters is this compressed, slightly surrealistic, three-semicolon beauty:
I’m just back; on the bed; have asked a boy to extract numerous burrs from my pants; I love you very much.
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