''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

-
151
-
the truth of the theory developed in that novel.
Humbert is all the more guilty as he is perfectly
aware of it all. He knows that the words "for ever"
do not refer to the real child, that in a few years
she will cease being a nymphet, and there is the
thought in his mind
that around 1950 I would have to get rid
somehow of a difficult adolescent whose
magic nymphage had evaporated (170),
but quite early, during their first trip, he firmly
decides "to ignore what I could not help perceiving"
and he makes this decision for purely selfish rea-
sons: "in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace" (276).
Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, names respect
and knowledge as two of the essential constituents
of love. He uses "respect" in the old meaning, sug-
gested by its root: "respicere" = "to look (back)
at"; "regard"; "to pay attention to"; "to observe
carefully"; "to regard as being of a certain kind"
91,
and takes it to be the ability to see a person as he
really is, to see him as having a unique and quite
individual personality. To love a person means to
feel as one with that person as he is, not as one
would like him to be, or as he ought to be.
92
To
obtain real knowledge of a person is possible only
if one overcomes all self-interested motives and
succeeds in seeing that other person as he sees
himself.
93
It is only at the end, and when she is lost to
him, that "respect" and "knowledge" enter into Hum-
bert's feelings for Lolita. When he sees her before