Glory by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

but that one a Cézanne (charcoal doodle vaguely resembling the female form), and where a fourteenth-century bishop of colored wood stood proffering the stump of his forearm. The most cordial digs of all were Darwin’s, especially if you looked carefully and browsed a bit: what a gem, for example, that set of newspaper issues Darwin had edited in the trenches! The paper was cheerful, jaunty, full of funny jingles; heaven only knows how and where the type was set; and it used chance clichés to beautify blanks—corset advertisements found in the ruins of some printing plant.
    “Here,” said Darwin, producing a book, “take it.”
    The book proved to be remarkable. The pieces were not really short stories—no, they were rather more like tractates, twenty tractates of equal length. The first was called “Corkscrews,” and contained a thousand interesting things about corkscrews, their history, beauty, and virtues. Another was on parrots, a third on playing cards, a fourth on infernal machines, a fifth on reflections in water. And there was one on trains, and in it Martin found everything he loved: the telegraph poles, cutting short the wires’ upward sweep, the dining car with those bottles of Vichy or Evian that seemed to scan through the window the trees flying past; and those crazy-eyed waiters, and that minuscule kitchen, where swaying and sweating a white-capped man cook could be seen crumbing a fish.
    If Martin had ever thought of becoming a writer and been tormented by a writer’s covetousness (so akin to the fear of death), by that constant state of anxiety compelling one to fix indelibly this or that evanescent trifle, perhaps these dissertations on minutiae that were deeply familiar to him might have aroused in him a pang of envy and the desire to write of the same things still better. Instead, such warm good willtoward Darwin overwhelmed him that his eyes even began to tickle. And next morning when, on the way to his lecture, he overtook his friend at the corner, he said with perfect decorum and not looking him in the face that he had liked the book, and silently walked beside him, falling in with Darwin’s indolent but swingy step.
    The lecture halls were scattered about the whole town. If one lecture immediately followed another but was given in a different hall, you had to hop on your bicycle, or else scuttle along back alleys and cross the echoing stone of courts. Limpid chimes called back and forth from tower to tower; the din of motors, the crepitation of wheels, and the tinkle of bicycle bells filled the narrow streets. During the lecture the glittering swarm of bicycles clustered at the gates, awaiting their owners. The black-gowned lecturer would mount the platform and with a thump put his tasseled square cap on the lectern.

15
    When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine precipice, by steel come to life, by the divine exactitude of calculation. He understood that impressionable archeologist who, after having cleared the path to as yet unknown tombs and treasures, knocked on the door before entering, and, once inside, fainted with emotion. Beauty dwells in the light and stillness of laboratories: like an expert diver gliding through the water with open eyes, the biologist gazes with relaxed eyelids into the microscope’s depths, and his neck andforehead slowly begin to flush, and, tearing himself away from the eyepiece, he says, “That settles everything.” Human thought, flying on the trapezes of the star-filled universe, with mathematics stretched beneath, was like an acrobat working with a net but suddenly noticing that in reality there is no net, and Martin envied those who attained that vertigo and, with a new calculation, overcame their fear.