Anaïs Nin & Anaïs Nin, in furs

Vladimir Nabokov wrote most of his novels on 3” x 5” notecards, keeping blank cards under his pillow for whenever inspiration struck. Seen here: a draft of Lolita.

none of these butterflies exist in reality, they are all of Nabokov’s creation and illustration

Nabokov the lepidopterist and entomologist

“When others asked the truth of me,

I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted,

but an illusion they could bear to live with.”

She smiled at a man’s great need to build cities when it was so much harder to build relationships, his need to conquer countries when it was so much harder to conquer one heart, to satisfy a child, to create a perfect human life. Man’s need to invent, to circumnavigate space when it is so much harder to overcome space between human beings, man’s need to organize systems of philosophy when it was so much harder to understand one human being, and when the greatest depths of human character lay but half explored.

—   Anaïs Nin, The Four-Chambered Heart

photograph of J. D. Salinger, pulling on his socks

age 49

taken April 1968

Desire which had stretched the nerve broke, and each nerve seemed to break separately, continuously, making incisions, and acid ran instead of blood. I writhed within my own life, seeking a free avenue to carry the molten cries, to melt the pain into a cauldron of words for everyone to dip into, everyone who sought words for their own pain. What an enormous cauldron I stir now; enormous mouthfuls of acid I feed the others now, words bitter enough to burn all bitterness.

The smoke sent my head to the ceiling: there it hung, looking down upon frog eyes, straw hair, mouth of soiled leather, mirrors of bald heads, furred monkey hands with ham colored palms. The music whipped the past out of its tomb and mummies flagellated my memory.

House of Incest

Your lies are not lies, Sabina. They are arrows flung out of your orbit by the strength of your fantasy. To nourish illusion. To destroy reality. I will help you: it is I who will invent lies for you and with them we will traverse the world. But behind our lies I am dropping Ariadne’s golden thread—for the greatest of all joys is to be able to retrace one’s lies, to return to the source and sleep one night a year washed of all superstructures.

Sabina, you made your impression upon the world. I passed through it like a ghost. Does anyone notice the owl in the tree at night, the bat which strikes the window pane while others are talking, the eyes which reflect like water and drink like blotting paper, the pity which flickers quietly like candlelight, the understanding on which people lay themselves to sleep?

DOES ANYONE KNOW WHO I AM?

At that instant my lioness shot me a strange glance. I shuddered—I don’t know why; and the early red light dipped me and her and him in blood.

“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

Homer’s Iliad

Baba

Walton Ford, watercolor, gouache, graphite and ink

riverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth, Castle and Environs