Without Lifting A Finger

Finished Emma (singing the De profundis I buried her yesterday); have a few more pages left on Emants' A Posthumous Confession ; started a Kindle version (hope the commentary has hyperlinks back to the poem) of Nabokov's Pale Fire (read it last maybe 7 or more years ago). Re Pale Fire's Preface (ghost written by Charles Kinbote), I'll only copy out the wonderful sentence evoking the mourning cloak butterfly (where I live there's a few stands of cottonwoods that lure them in: I wait every year for the little mummies to evict the ashen tenants fringed with yellow): As a rule, Shade destroyed drafts the moment he ceased to need them: well do I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of them in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fe.    

This excerpt is re the narrator's initial thoughts about Anna (he's hoping she will become his wife): For my part, I did not find her in the least attractive; but a lover of clear lines would probably have come to a different conclusion. The blue of the eyes was too light for me, the almost imperceptible lashes and eyebrows did not set the eyes off, the small, tilted nose gave her a childlike quality, and the cool, marbled skin aroused not the slightest sensual desire in me. If at that moment I had been permitted to give her a kiss, I would not have done it, or have done it without pleasure. Outdoors in a crowd she would certainly have passed me entirely unnoticed;  in these stuffy domestic surroundings we saw each other as two prisoners who could escape only by combining forces. 

I found this novel via Coetzee (in fact he's the translator of the version I bought) and, though a bit slow-going and very reminiscent of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, it is keeping my interest.     My wife is dead and buried.     I am alone at home, alone with the two maids.     So I am free again. Yet what good is it to me, this freedom? I am within reach of what I have wanted for the last twenty years (I am thirty-five), but I have not the courage to grasp it, and would anyhow no longer enjoy it very much. * I've also got plans to dig into T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" again this summer. The "Notes" have always intrigued me, because I'm not sure they go very far toward elucidation.  Maybe I just need to read Weston's book, as T.S. suggests, but I'll probably save that for another time. Instead, I've printed out various essays and perspectives from the Net. I'll start here.