Without Lifting A Finger

Something from Speak :      During the beginning of that summer and all through the previous one, Tamara's name had kept cropping up (with the feigned naivete so typical of Fate, when meaning business) here and there on our estate (Entry Forbidden) and on my uncle's land (Entry Strictly Forbidden) on the opposite bank of Oredezh. I would find it written with a stick on the reddish sand of a park avenue, or penciled on a whitewashed wicket, or freshly carved (but not completed) in the wood of some ancient bench, as if Mother Nature were giving me mysterious advance notices of Tamara's existence. That hushed July afternoon, when I discovered her standing still (only her eyes were moving) in a birch grove, she seemed to have been spontaneously generated there, among watchful trees, with the silent completeness of a mythological manifestation.

Finished Cosmos , sparingly dipping into Dziennik (kind of saving it for my trip to Germany/Poland this summer), and am re-reading Nabokov's Speak, Memory  (third time, first time via Kindle). * From Speak : My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the émigré who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.      And finally: I reserve for myself the right to yearn after an ecological niche:           ... Beneath the sky           Of my America to sigh                  For one locality in           ...