Status Updates From Pnin

“St. Bart’s was not particularly pleased either with Lake’s methods or with their results, but kept him on because it was fashionable to have at least one distinguished freak on staff.”

“As he walked to the little tavern in library lane…Pnin suddenly felt very tired. Not only had the Zol. Fond tome become even heavier after its unnecessary visit to the library, but something that Pnin had half heard in the course of the day…, now bothered and oppressed him, as does, in retrospection, a blunder we have made, a piece of rudeness we have allowed ourselves, or a threat we have chosen to ignore.”

Reminds me so much of, and clearly influenced by, A Picture of Dorian Gray.

“But the pang of tenderness remained, akin to the vibrating outline of verses you know you know but cannot recall.”

“‘It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of Communism - all that psychiatry’, rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. “Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?”