Activity

heaven must perforce be a place of serious noticing

Nabokov's is a highly self-serving and romantic view of the author, who seems to have no indebtedness to any other author; indeed, in Nabokov's mythology, this writer, who fashions humans from ribs, is God Himself, which might well mean Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov.

looking is always mediated by other representations of looking

suffering from a surfeit of bloody pungency