Fragments of Immortality

After reading several of Vladimir Nabokov’s greatest works, one can only hope to become increasingly familiar with the enchanter and his grand illusions. From the macrocosm of overarching themes, one begins to see the finite world of imagined connections as well as those suspiciously insignificant details. The reverse is also true. Within the microcosms of simple words, mere fragments, lie the whispers of eternity. One line, on page 125 of Nabokov’s Lolita, encapsulates, in the simplest way, the nature of Humbert Humbert’s affliction.


Humbert, having safely secured his Lolita from the eyes of the world, remarks, “I wandered through various public rooms, glory below, gloom above: for the look of lust always is gloomy” (125). Beneath the darkness of Humbert’s obsession, burns something small and tentative, a deep and abiding love, albeit crippled by a web of lust and lies. Limitless heaven and torturous hell combined, this is the nature of Humbert’s lust. The word glory in this seemingly offhand statement foreshadows the emergence of a value far greater than the beastly Humbert thinks himself capable of.


This man, this monster, lives a wretched existence. He struggles in vain to gratify his desires while preserving not only the innocence of Lolita’s childhood but also the innocence of his earliest encounters with love. In Lolita, his beloved Annabel lives on, as does a love that was guiltless and full. Beneath the violence of Humbert’s desire, lies a sea of calm, beneath the beast, a timid soul. As he struggles to unite himself with that earliest vision, through the person of Lolita, in order that he too may be guiltless and radiant, he generates the antithesis of that love.


On some level, Humbert Humbert knows this self-deception exists. In one poignant scene, he describes, painfully, an episode of remorse in which “at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness (with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again” (285). Redemption lies forever out of Humbert’s reach as he continually condemns himself to an animalistic state of continual gratification rather than heeding the tortured spasms of a soul yearning to be human. Instead, he exiles himself from this humanity, becoming the beast he proclaims himself to be, like a disgusting worm crawling over the petals of a delicate rose, marring its perfection.


Humbert Humbert achieves a broken sort of redemption in the discovery that he truly loved Lolita, that there was “glory” beneath the “gloom”, but the moment he realizes this truth, Humbert is forced to realize that he has destroyed the very innocence he sought to capture in her. Lust destroys his broken love in the end. As he stands on the precipice of this realization, listening to the melodic cries of untarnished children at play, he recognizes, finally, that the true tragedy “was not Lolita’s absence from [his] side, but the absence of her voice from that concord” (308). This, the totality of that destruction is all Humbert Humbert can see.


In the artful depiction of this “glory” beneath the “gloom,” perhaps Humbert Humbert has earned his immortal legacy, as one of the most sublimely eloquent yet despicably monstrous creatures to have fallen short of paradise.