Бледный огонь - Владимир Набоков

Who'd seen the Pope, people in books, and God.

I was brought up by dear bizarre Aunt Maud,

A poet and a painter with a taste

For realistic objects interlaced

With grotesque growths and images of doom.

[090] She lived to hear the next babe cry. Her room

We've kept intact. Its trivia create

A still life in her style: the paperweight

Of convex glass enclosing a lagoon,

The verse book open at the Index (Moon,

Moonrise, Moor, Moral), the forlorn guitar,

The human skull; and from the local Star

A curio: Red Sox Beat Yanks 5–4

On Chapman's Homer, thumb tacked to the door.

My God died young. Theolatry I found

[100] Degrading, and its premises, unsound.

No free man needs a God; but was I free?

How fully I felt nature glued to me

And how my childish palate loved the taste

Half-fish, half-honey, of that golden paste!

My picture book was at an early age

The painted parchment papering our cage:

Mauve rings around the moon; blood-orange sun

Twinned Iris; and that rare phenomenon

The iridule — when beautiful and strange,

[110] In a bright sky above a mountain range

One opal cloudlet in an oval form

Reflects the rainbow of a thunderstorm

Which in a distant valley has been staged —

For we are most artistically caged.

And there's the wall of sound: the nightly wall

Raised by a trillion crickets in the fall.

Impenetrable! Halfway up the hill

I'd pause in thrall of their delirious trill.

That's Dr. Sutton's light. That's the Great Bear.

[120] A thousand years ago five minutes were

Equal to forty ounces of fine sand.

Outstare the stars. Infinite foretime and

Infinite aftertime: above your head

They close like giant wings, and you are dead.

The regular vulgarian, I daresay,

Is happier: he sees the Milky Way

Only when making water. Then as now

I walked at my own risk: whipped by the bough,

Tripped by the stump. Asthmatic, lame and fat,

[130] I never bounced a ball or swung a bat.

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.

I had a brain, five senses (one unique),

But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.

In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps

But really envied nothing — save perhaps

The miracle of a lemniscate left

Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft

Bicycle tires.

A thread of subtle pain,

[140] Tugged at by playful death, released again,

But always present, ran through me. One day,

When I'd just turned eleven, as I lay

Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy —

A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy —

Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,

There was a sudden sunburst in my head.

And then black night. That blackness was sublime.

I felt distributed through space and time:

One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand

[150] Under the pebbles of a panting strand,

One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,

In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.

There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green

Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,

An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,

And all tomorrows in my funnybone.

During one winter every afternoon

I'd sink into that momentary swoon.

And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim.

[160] My health improved. I even learned to swim.

But like some little lad forced by a wench

With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,

I was corrupted, terrified, allured,

And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured

Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains,

The wonder lingers and the shame remains.

There was a time in my demented youth

When somehow I suspected that the truth

About survival after death was known

[170] To every human being: I alone

Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy

Of books and people hid the truth from me.

There was the day when I began to doubt

Man's sanity: How could he live without

Knowing for sure what dawn, what death, what doom

Awaited consciousness beyond the tomb?

And finally there was the sleepless night

When I decided to explore and fight

The foul, the inadmissible abyss,

[180] Devoting all my twisted life to this

One task. Today I'm sixty-one. Waxwings

Are berry-pecking. A cicada sings.

The little scissors I am holding are

A dazzling synthesis of sun and star.

I stand before the window and I pare

My fingernails and vaguely am aware

Of certain flinching likenesses: the thumb,

Our grocer's son; the index, lean and glum

College astronomer Starover Blue;

[190] The middle fellow, a tall priest I knew;

The feminine fourth finger, an old flirt;

And little pinky clinging to her skirt.

And I make mouths as I snip off the thin

Strips of what Aunt Maud used to call «scarf-skin.»

Maud Shade was eighty when a sudden hush