humbert humbert

So here's why I love and despise Humbert Humbert from Lolita. The same reason why we love and despise anything: because they reflect aspects of ourselves. And these love-hate relationships are more uncommon than you'd think: it's not the one with a romantic partner, because it's unsustainable, it's not someone you're jealous of, because you don't love them, it's not anyone you love and hate, but for different reasons. No. This is a relation of a singular focus.

Humbert Humbert and I, for example, share one thing, obsessive narcissism, in the form of post-facto analysis. We believe firmly that every occurrence defines not only the present, but re-defines everything that preceded it. Think how exponentially complex this becomes by pure mathematical reasoning alone! It's too much to think about. You know what's not too much to think about? How every thought currently produced by our minds transforms who we are. As we speak, that transformation's already done and filed away, only to be retrieved in the following second, still sticky and glued to the one before it. HH's ability to take a still scene, infinitesimally discountable in time, and write pieces and pieces of gorgeousness about, at, from, and beyond it, such that every composed sentence reveals beauty but also the fact that it's carefully doctored, it's such a profound waste of time, yet the only way we (and by "we" I mean only HH and I, and half of us is fictional) can truly tell if something warrants the term 'meaningful'.

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