The moral sense in mortals is the duty--Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
Funny, after reading Lolita, I was moved to post this quote. Before doing so, though, I thought I’d do a Google search to see what turned up. Well... apparently I’m not the only one who sees this quote as summarizing the book! (That’s comforting, at least, for more than one reason.)
As I see it, the book illustrates that fact that only the absolutely rock-hardened soul, which can't help but destroy itself in due time, can escape the internal reckoning that sin provokes and that love (beauty) reveals as being necessary. But, in order to cope with this reckoning, the person must live a “palliative” existence; one which consists of attempts to atone for one’s sins (which the conscience records) or soothe the barbs of conscience that constantly prick, or ignore/destroy/cover up the evidence, both internal and external.
The only solution to such an existence is to come clean, and the only redemption, which poor Humbert unfortunately never finds, is to bury his putrid sins in Christ and thereby find himself a new, forgiven Humbert as he walks forward into the future.
