the pilgrim's complaint
While sick, every paragraph I write seems to demand an hour of napping in return. Yesterday it was two paragraphs followed by a two-hour nap. If I try to write more today, the consequences could be dire.
It's probably for the best that my poor annotator of Pnin didn't get as far as Chapter Six, where Nabokov smirks:
Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as "Description of nature," or "Irony"; and in a pretty edition of Mallarmé's poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it "birds."
Overall it's one of his dreamier works, with multiple shades of half-reality gently layered atop one another; it seems like exactly the thing he would want to write after Lolita, which for him is a shockingly straightforward book, at least on the basic level of plot. I am reading Austerlitz now, and probably would have finished it last night but my tooth started hurting. Soon, soon.
