I thought these words were the beginning of my favorite Lana del Rey song.
Before Lana put them down, they were the first words in the book Lolita.
I always pictured Lolita as this unreal, ethereal blonde whose innocence could not be broken no matter what was done to her. I thought she was beautiful and perhaps a flat character who was not grown up but knew she wanted to do good things in the world, and make friends with animals, and skip through meadows.
Instead, Lolita is a brown-haired, petulant, naughty, promiscuous girl who doesn't take enough baths and has no respect for her mother.
And yet the narrator, Humbert, the man who falls in love (or lust) with this youthful teenage girl, is blind to her faults and instead sees his childhood lover; a sort of fairy; a mirage.
It is as if he is so ill from dissatisfaction with all lovers that cannot replace his dead childhood love, that in one moment of desperation he sees a girl- and unfortunately the girl he saw was the greasy Dolores he comes to call Lolita- and crafts her in his head into exactly what he wants to see.
Even as Humbert writes his memoir from prison and records Lolita's faults he deems them trifling and in the end writes that he wants his work to be an everlasting monument to the girl.
The poor, poor man, frustrated to the point of madness since childhood - and had he been real, the purpose of his life would have been? Not to advise us, because his actions were star-crossed, inevitable. His lust, his love was mad and blind. Not to make us change our minds about perverts by the writing of his book, I hope, except maybe to see them with a little less hate and a little more sadness and helplessness.
Perhaps to show us how to love the Lolitas of the world. To love blindly and with abandon the dirty and nasty young things nobody likes.
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