Word: madman
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...nothing but bones, and even those you could have wrapped in a hankie. His twisted figure was like a knotted string, and he hated his parishioners. With fierce Puritan intensity he preached burning, his whole inside crying die, shouting die. He worked in his garden obsessively, like a madman picking imaginary lint from his sleeve. He wanted women, imagined them in every posture. He wrote dirty doggerel and lied-his single skill. He lived in a thousand careening pieces, like a shattered army...
...know lots of languages," the lanky, boyish-looking speaker assured an enraptured audience in New York's Town Hall last week. "I can talk to trees. And I do pretty well talking Holyman. You must be able to speak first to an amoeba, your father, a madman, Buddha, your lover...
...nameless European republic in the middle '30s, the play is about a madman named Salvator Waltz and his infernal invention, a machine which, Waltz insists, can produce at any distance an explosion of incredible force. Preposterous, snorts the Minister of War. Waltz obligingly blasts the top off a nearby mountain. Proclaiming an era of universal peace (and general slavery), he seizes the reins of government from the numbed fingers of a gabbling, gasping Cabinet, promptly mounts a demented reign of terror. He responds to an attempted assassination by blowing up a city of 600,000. Weary of ruling...
...invention, and his successful rise to power, and-for all the reader knows-most of the fools, fops, frauds, pacifists, pederasts, know-nothings and impotents who people the play, have been merely the fantasies of Waltz's buzzing brain. This whole monstrous world, suggests Nabokov, is just a madman's dream. Does Waltz speak for Nabokov? Nabokov says nyet. Yet by refusing to establish any objective grounding, Nabokov reduces his cloud-capped tower of fantasy to a dusty heap of speculation. The reader is left to realize that where there is no possible answer, there can have been...
...famous climax-a passage in which the hero realizes in horror the futility to which his passion for the past has condemned him. He must spend the rest of his life in a jungle clearing, reading Dickens over and over and over to a madman...