There will always be times in life when circumstances force us to start anew. Such is the case today, with regards to my most candid form of online presence. While the hundreds of pages that constitute Night's Sindark Nave are not lost to the universe, they are to be effectively lost from the internet for at least the immediate future - in increasingly thorough fashion as various caches are cleared. This is a circumstance that seems to me regrettable but not avoidable.
The forum that succeeds it shall necessarily be a more circumscribed and restricted place than its forbear: again, a circumstance that I lament on many levels but feel bound to accept. It was always an experiment that combined boldness with folly to be so forthright in so open a medium. The possibility remains that, when I have the time to actually pick my way back through that lengthy archive, some portion of it will be returned to a form that is properly publicly accessible. For now, I ask that any bits you happen to possess or find be retained in a private capacity and not advertised or distributed.
Between work, the report, and preparing for my departure, I really don't have the time to either create anything new and extensive or go back and render safe that which has already been written. For the moment, just feel confident that my urge to write is not a weak or passing one. I shall find a way.
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So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in and looked towards the sun, and walked into the sky.
have reserved for the conclusion of my "Annabel" phase the account of our unsuccessful first tryst. One night, she managed to deceive the vicious vigilance of her family. In a nervous and slender-leaved mimosa grove at the back of their villa we found a perch on the ruins of a low stone wall. Through the darkness and the tender trees we could see the arabesques of lighted windows which, touched up by the colored inks of sensitive memory, appear to me now like playing cards--presumably because a bridge game was keeping the enemy busy. She trembled and twitched as I kissed the corner of her parted lips and the hot lobe of her ear. A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own. Her legs, her lovely live legs, were not too close together, and when my hand located what it sought, a dreamy and eerie expression, half-pleasure, half-pain, came over those childish features. She sat a little higher than I, and whenever in her solitary ecstasy she was led to kiss me, her head would bend with a sleepy, soft, drooping movement that was almost woeful, and her bare knees caught and compressed my wrist, and slackened again; and her quivering mouth, distorted by the acridity of some mysterious potion, with a sibilant intake of breath came near to my face. She would try to relieve the pain of love by first roughly rubbing her dry lips against mine; then my darling would draw away with a nervous toss of her hair, and then again come darkly near and let me feed on her open mouth, while with a generosity that was ready to offer her everything, my heart, my throat, my entrails, I gave her to hold in her awkward fist the scepter of my passion.
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And yet it is our awareness of Humbert's pathology that makes his seduction so powerful. He knows he's doing wrong. We know he's doing wrong. He can't stop himself. And we can't stop ourselves from watching.
Nor, if we are honest, do we look upon Humbert with pure disgust. In our covert hearts, we root for him, because he loves her, and because, when you come right down to it, most of our own wishes are illicit, or feel that way to us. Humbert's crimes, in other words, may be of a greater scale than the ones we commit, but the same cauldron of deviance bubbles within us.
Currently, my favorite novel is Lolita, followed (quite closely) by the Sound and Fury. Nabokov writes as only someone writing in their second language can: words still have the tiniest gap between sound and meaning, that little space, early obliterated in one's native language, where pure aesthetic attention is lavished upon every sentence.
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