Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Chapter 4

I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began? Every day, people lose loved ones and every day people suffer for it, but not how I suffered. The sympathy with which I had looked upon baby animals, I now turned upon myself. When I try to analyze my own self-absorption, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way, the death of Annabel led me to Charlotte, and then, of course, to Lolita.

I also know that the shock of Annabel's death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries. Coincidence?