more nabokov; why I am not "religious"
So why join in the vulgar laughter? Why Scorn a hereafter none can verify:
The Turk's delight, the future lyres, the talks With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks, The seraph with his six flamingo wings,
And Flemish hells with porcupines and things? It isn't that we dream too wild a dream:
The trouble is we do not make it seem
Sufficiently unlikely; for the most We can think up is a domestic ghost.
--Pale Fire, Canto II, lines 221-230
more nabokov; why I am not "religious"
And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band...
more nabokov; why I am not "religious"
...Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newlydead
Stored in its strongholds through the years.
--"Pale Fire," Canto II, lines 525-536
(cc: @anthracite, with love)