HH: 'Poets Don't Kill'

Few things are as fascinating as a deranged person defending their derangeness.

Here's how HH defines people like himself.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the majority of sex offenders that hanker for some throbbing, sweet-moaning, physical but not necessarily, coital, relation with a girl-child are innocuous, inadequate, passive, timid strangers who merely ask the community to allow them to pursue their practically harmless, so-called aberrant behavior, their little hot wet private acts of sexual deviation without the police and society cracking down upon them. We are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild dog-eyed gentleman, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet. Emphatically, no killers are we. Poets never kill [pg87].

It's the "control" and willingness to give "years and years" that make him such a dangerous predator. Not to mention that he thinks what he's doing is "private" and "practically harmless."

I stick to my notion that he's a loathsome person who writes better than most people. I'm guessing so does fellow blogger-reader Angelle.

What do you think?

Desire [updated]

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."