In high school I was learning how to read for symbols in addition to surfaces, and I read Lolita as a symbol for the things we love but cannot keep. I was old enough to know, if not accept, that my hormone-fueled infatuation would dim, just as Lolita’s charms fade into a banal adulthood. (She looks “pale and polluted” when Humbert sees her last.) “Lolita has to be impossibly young,” writes Elif Batuman in the London Review of Books, “because the brevity of youth is a metonym for the brevity of life, and the monstrousness of Humbert’s passion is the monstrousness of facelifts, or of Lenin’s tomb, or of the wedding cake in Great Expectations.” A passion for youth is a passion for what is at every moment in the process of decline. Lolita, then, is not only about the irretrievability of innocence but about the doomed structure of desire itself. Desire, like youth, is endangered by its very continuation. To try to remain young is to grow old. To want all the way to the culmination of consummation is to stop wanting. Orgasm = death. What romance doesn’t come to seem “pale and polluted” in the aftermath?