The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.

I can't tell you howI knew - but I did know that I had crossedThe border. Everything I loved was lostBut no aorta could report regret.A sun of rubber was convulsed and set;And blood-black nothingness began to spinA system of cells interlinked within Cells interlinked within cells interlinkedWithin one stem. And dreadfully distinctAgainst the dark, a tall white fountain played.

And presently I was shaking hands with both of them in the street, the sloping street, and everything was whirling and flying before the approaching white deluge, and a truck with a mattress from Philadelphia was confidently rolling down to an empty house, and dust was running and writhing over the exact slab of stone where Charlotte, when they lifted the laprobe for me, had been revealed, curled up, her eyes intact, their black lashes still wet, matted, like yours, Lolita.

Finally it gave up- as some day life will give up- bothering me.

the only real, genuinely unquestionable thing here was only death itself

As she began losing track of herself, she though it proper to inform a series of receding Lucettes - telling them to pass it on and on in a trick-crystal regression - that what death amounted to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions of solitude.

And what is death, if not a face at peace - its artistic perfection.