What Humbert Humbert lusts after is deplorable.
But what about his relationship to his object of desires? After Humbert's divorce, and hospitalization, he joins "an expedition into the arctic Canada."[pg33]
"We lived in a prefabricated timber cabins amid a Pre-Cambrian world of granite. We had heaps of supplies -- the Reader's Digest, an ice cream mixer, chemical toilets, paper caps for Christmas. My health improved wonderfully in spite or because of all the fantastic blankness and boredom...I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me."[pg33]
Absent that which he desires, Humbert is a stranger to himself. it speaks to how central a role desire, and the pursuit of that desire is, to his identity. He's taken jobs, a wife, and traveled across the world, pursuing his desire (nymphets).
Where have our desires led us?
What would happen to you if your desires were somehow removed from you?
Is his relationship to desire weird? Or is distinctly, painfully, part of what it means to be human?
Department of Reader Insight: Hazelgrouse says, "We all relate to HH better than we'd like to, and this doesn't mean we're closet nymphetophiles."
