Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov Read Free Book Online

in the city for its size and the rarity of its volumes, kept several such curiosities. That was a remote world, where the simplest objects sparkled with youth and an inborn insolence, proceeding from the reverence that surrounded the labor devoted to their manufacture. Those were years of universal fluidity; well-oiled metals performed silent soundless acrobatics; the harmonious lines of men’s suits were dictated by the unheard-of limberness of muscular bodies; the flowing glass of enormous windows curved around corners of buildings; a girl in a bathing suit flew like a swallow so high over a pool that it seemed no larger than a saucer; a high-jumper lay supine in the air, having already made such an extreme effort that, if it were not for the flaglike folds of his shorts, he would seem to be in lazy repose; and water ran, glided endlessly; the gracefulness of falling water, the dazzling details of bathrooms; the satiny ripples of the ocean with a two-winged shadow falling on it. Everything was lustrous and shimmering; everything gravitated passionately toward a kind of perfection whose definition was absence of friction. Reveling in all the temptations of the circle, life whirled to a state of such giddiness that the ground fell away and, stumbling, falling, weakened by nausea and languor—ought I to say it?—finding itself in a new dimension, as it were … Yes, matter has grown oldand weary, and little has survived of those legendary days—a couple of machines, two or three fountains—and no one regrets the past, and even the very concept of “past” has changed.
    “But then perhaps,” thought Cincinnatus, “I am misinterpreting these pictures. Attributing to the epoch the characteristics of its photograph. The wealth of shadows, the torrents of light, the gloss of a tanned shoulder, the rare reflection, the fluid transitions from one element to another—perhaps all of this pertains only to the snapshot, to a particular kind of heliotypy, to special forms of that art, and the world really never was so sinuous, so humid and rapid-just as today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world.”
    “But then perhaps” (Cincinnatus began to write rapidly on a sheet of ruled paper) “I am misinterpreting … Attributing to the epoch … This wealth … Torrents … Fluid transitions … And the world really never was … Just as … But how can these ruminations help my anguish? Oh, my anguish—what shall I do with you, with myself? How dare they conceal from me … I, who must pass through an ordeal of supreme pain, I, who, in order to preserve a semblance of dignity (anyway I shall not go beyond silent pallor—I am no hero anyway …), must during that ordeal keep control of all my faculties, I, I … am gradually weakening … the uncertainty is horrible—well, why don’t you tell me, do tell me—but no, you have me die anew every morning … On the other hand, were I to know, I could perform … a short work … a record of verified thoughts … Some day someone would read it and would suddenly feel just as if he had awakened for the first time in a strangecountry. What I mean to say is that I would make him suddenly burst into tears of joy, his eyes would melt, and, after he experiences this, the world will seem to him cleaner, fresher. But how can I begin writing when I do not know whether I shall have time enough, and the torture comes when you say to yourself, ‘Yesterday there would have been enough time’—and again you think, ‘If only I had begun yesterday …’ And instead of the clear and precise work that is needed, instead of a gradual preparation of the soul for that morning when it will have to get up, when—when you, soul, will be offered the executioner’s pail to wash in—Instead, you involuntarily indulge in banal senseless dreams of escape—alas, of escape … Today, when she came running in, stamping