…which is another term for authentic art. So said Nabokov, in his lectures on Don Quixote (Harvest/HBJ, 1983), whose birthday was honored yesterday. A pleasant synchronicity, I happened to have read aloud, on our drive back from Virginia, the evening before Spring in Fialta. (A text online here.)
Segur complained to me about the weather, and at first I did not understand what he was talking about; even if the moist, gray, greenhouse essence of Fialta might be called “weather,” it was just as much outside of anything that could serve us as a topic of conversation as was, for instance, Nina’s slender elbow, which I was holding between finger and thumb, or a bit of tin foil someone had dropped, shining in the middle of the cobbled street in the distance.