Fieldnotes on Humanity

So, finally, I finished reading Nabokov's Lolita. The immorality of Humbert Humbert and his actions towards Lolita tell us how far one can get from his or her righteous conscience, the very inner quality of guiding to the rightness. It raises questions about our understanding of ourselves in modern times, such as to what extent the human conscience has lost its moral judgment. This is a chronic affliction that a reader might experience in reading Lolita and this is precisely what Humbert Humbert suffers from. Lolita is a testimony to our pain and suffering in our modern day, which is defeated by an indiscernible joy. We do not understand what Nabokov really says unless we put aside our preconceptions about the moral issues that the book raises. I thought it was relevant to bring in Schopenhauer's input. In his essay on pessimism, Schopenhauer says that in order to understand this world’s suffering and misery, one must be accustomed to the fact that this world is a penitentia...

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta." From the book. For years, I have been desperately  seeking the opportunity to read  Lolita  by Vladimir Nabokov, and finally, the moment has  arrived.  For the past few days, I have been sitting in coffee shops, reading this captivating book. It is disgustingly beautiful, and delightfully troubling. A reader must mentally be prepared to encounter unseen, unheard, invisible, and unthinkable stories and events in  Lolita. It is definitely unsettling for people in this day and age to see a man, probably in his 40s, having a sexual affair with a 13-year-old girl. In the beginning, Humbert Humbert explains that this is the age when marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are uncommon, but by doing so, he also tries to familiarize the reader with his perversion. As...