Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions Read Online Free

outwardly cheerful enough, I was pretty sure I was dying -and of natural causes, too. My body was subject to strange tinglings. Throughout my tragic siestas I lay there trembling and boiling, as if a tram station or a foundry had established itself beneath the bed. I watched the world through veils of helplessness. This was no hangover. This was old age. One morning I found a brief report on the Dinard ordeal in the Herald Tribune. Incredibly, there was no mention whatever of the quiet and simple heroism with which I had borne it... My wife suggested that I was suffering from delayed shock - which, I admit, gave me quite a turn, Although I had privately diagnosed a brain tumour, I was still reluctant to identify the malaise as an after-effect of something that had bothered me so little. My body, however, continued to insist on the truth. Hoaxers and other operatives in the terror business will be relieved to learn that, when it comes to fear, there's no such thing as a free lunch, or a free dinner.
    So much, then, for my valour on the fields of France. I emerge from the incident with another new experience, and no credit whatever. I was as brave as a lord, as brave as a newt. Chemically numbed at the time, my fear — of which there had clearly been plenty — had just burrowed deep and waited. I had sneaked out of the restaurant without settling the bill. The body's accountants had redressed the ledger, with interest. And for nearly a week I was wearily picking up that tab.
     
    Observer, 1985
     

NUCLEAR CITY: THE MEGADEATH INTELLECTUALS
     
    Washington is nuclear city. In any imaginable exchange, however 'surgical', 'splendid', 'cathartic' or 'therapeutic', Washington would go (and so would San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco). Washington would be 'taken out'. Its well-forested malls would go, the silver masonry of its imperial buildings would go, its museums and monuments would go; a good deal of such history as America has would go, along with all the random life that any great city contains: the jazz bars of Georgetown, the residential follies of Capitol Hill, the beggars (lobbyists of the street), the graffito saying NO NUKES, the bumper sticker saying NO FAT CHICKS, the National Gallery's Matisse: The Early Years in Nice (and that particular interest in human form and posture), the Rose Garden, the day schools — all would go. Washington stands there, like a king on a tumbrel, awaiting decapitation.
    When nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe. Staring at the many-eyed helmet of the Capitol, you see the clouds above on fire, the winter sky ignited, taken out. Now is the time to see this, and your head is the place to see it in. The reality won't be seen by anyone. Certain Virginians, I suppose, might get to view the lit brain, the scorching shower, the moronic fist of the mushroom cloud. But no one will 'see' the bursting city. To this crime there will be no witnesses; there will just be innocent bystanders, in their millions. Many times the cinema has tried to imagine a nuclear attack upon a city. What the cinema cannot get, what we cannot get, is the simultaneity: everything becoming nothing, all at once.
    Washington is nuclear city, is Thermopolis, in another sense, too. With famous prodigality and greed, nuclear weapons squander resources, gobble money, hog know-how. But what of the intellectual resources, what of the thought, the acuity, and concentration they hourly consume? In institutes, foundations, committees, endowments, and in a thousand offices along the corridors of power, people are sitting around all day thinking about these man-made objects, nuclear weapons - the strangest subject, with its squalor, profanity and nausea, its addictive fascination and terrible glamour, its unique inclusiveness and complexity. Having read a yard of