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into the abyss.

p 105 But nobody yet had been able to dig down to what was most captivating about her: this was the mysterious ability of her soul to apprehend in life only that which had once attracted and tormented her in childhood, the time when the soul's instinct is infallible: to seek out the amusing and the touching; to feel constantly an intolerable, tender pity for the creature whose life is helpless and unhappy; to feel across hundreds of miles that somewhere in Sicily a thin-legged little donkey with a shaggy belly is being brutally beaten. Whenever she did come across a creature that was being hurt, she experienced a kind of legendary eclipse - when inexplicable night comes down and ash flies and blood

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appears on the walls - and it seemed that if at once, she did not help, did not cut short another's torture (the existence of which it was absolutely impossible to explain in a world so conducive to happiness), her heart would not stand it and she would die, Hence, she lived in perpetual, secret agitation, constantly anticipating a new delight or a new pity ...

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Nabokov quoted in Escape to Aesthetics- Stegner

p 20 ... one gets closer to the reality of an object the more intensely one studies it, but no final or pure state of knowledge about lilies, or God, or life, or the mysteries of nature can ever be attained. "You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of levels, levels of perception, of false bottoms and hence unquenchable, unattainable."