Beauty, The Last Taboo

“I was content — until it was time to read Nabokov’s Lolita.”

Untitled, Sarah Getraer

Isabel Mehta is a 24-year-old living in New York City. She writes Everything is Copy and is an Assistant Editor of The New Critic.

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It was July. Every day felt hotter and hotter, and the hotness was melting my brain, and my brain was melting because I needed a job, and while my brain was melting, the flowers had fully bloomed, and I was sitting on a rock in Central Park while my friend walked, smiling, barefoot in the grass. We had been friends for a while at that point; we met in school. Our friendship was youthful, pure, and full of meaningful silence. I sat with my knees to my chin, watching him do push-ups. I was thinking about a job interview I had in two days.

He began running in circles around our little area of the park, barefoot. I didn’t want to join. I enjoyed watching him. Eventually he tired out, and we sat together at the top of the hill, on the rock. In silence, like we often were, we watched other couples picnic together with blankets and wine. The sun was going to set soon. We had nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and we both smelled like a garden. We bought ice cream from an ice cream truck — ice cream before dinner, ice cream for dinner — and we walked together on the sidewalk in the dusk trying to share the cone before the heat took it from us. The sun was never going to set. The days were so long you forgot they were going to end.

A few months earlier, the night before graduation, we were walking in the night, talking about some nonsense, eating chicken on a skewer and mango sticky rice. I fell asleep that night after he left, after a few hours chatting, and I slept so well, even though it was only for three or four hours. The next morning, it was hot and humid, and I had to put on a tight dress and a stupid hat and sit on folding chairs and listen to adults tell me things about my future. I hadn’t had a sip of water all morning and forgot to eat, and the sleep-deprivation-nausea came over me in a strong wave — so strong that right before the ceremony began, I snuck out of the hazy rows of graduates. Desperate for food or drink, I went to find a vending machine in the building where I had taken Spanish once. And he was there, on a bench, with a crisp red apple in a napkin, which he held out to me.

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At Harvard, “Veritas” was the name of the game, and I was certain reading, particularly the aesthetic experience of reading, was the gateway to it. I found solace in St. Augustine’s Confessions (“moreover, they are good, and they all together constitute myself”); my heart jolted awake to the ending of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go; I was transfixed by the brutal consciousness of Notes from Underground. The entrance to Harvard Yard reads, “Enter to grow in wisdom,” and I believed it was through my encounters with beauty in literature, through studying English, that I could do so. I learned from close-reading, sure, but it was often when consumed with beauty in the pages of a book — through beautiful language, a sublime image, or a character who reflected my life back at me — that I felt a true imprint on my soul. This, to me, was wisdom. This was truth.

In my senior spring, I enrolled in “The American Novel: Dreiser to the Present,” a canonical class taught by scholar Phillip Fisher. We read Faulkner, Salinger, Wharton, and Ellison, to name a few. The flowers had blossomed, the Charles River was warm in the morning, and I got to sit in that glorious class every Tuesday and Thursday with my coffee. I was content — until it was time to read Nabokov’s Lolita.

I had heard about the infamous, taboo novel the same way one does an old town legend: I was told it was important, but no one really said why. It was my first time ever reading Nabokov, too, a man whose triple-syllabic name sounds rhythmically royal, sophisticated, serious. But I couldn’t make it past the first 50 pages. I found both the characters (the charming pedophilic murderer Humbert Humbert and his 12-year-old victim Dolores Haze) tiresome and predictable and the plot (aside from two expected murders) mundane. Humbert drags Dolores from drab motel to drab motel, and interjects his tale with moments of bliss, anger, sadness, and arousal. He sleeps with her in a dingy bed, feels guilty about it, and proceeds to do it again. I did not like Lolita.

Nabokov writes in Lolita’s afterword that his novel has no “moral skew” but instead exists precisely for the sake of what he calls “aesthetic bliss,” or “a sense of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” But I felt no aesthetic connection to Lolita. Yet one does not have to feel something, or even finish a book, to write an essay about it. English students know this well. So I wrote an essay about the novel’s aesthetic value, how it justifies itself to exist because the language is beautiful, and in turn, I convinced myself of the value within Nabokov’s pages. What creates enough cultural and intellectual friction to sustain the novel through nearly 80 years of sexual politics is that Lolita — I remember now, yes — is a gorgeous novel about a terrible thing, and this is the point. Forget the narrator (a pedophile), forget the situation (the girl he is assaulting). The novel is dedicated to exquisite language, and the justification for that alone is a reason for a novel to exist. I then forgot about the novel until, almost two years after my first encounter with Lolita, the title re-appeared in my life in the most abysmal of places, the Epstein Files.

Yes, Jeffrey Epstein kept Lolita at his bedside, he etched lines from this novel on the arms and feet of his girls, and his private jet was known among friends as the “Lolita Express.” Epstein ordered the novel to his Kindle just 43 days before his trial. He even emailed University of Auckland professor and Nabokov scholar Brian Boyd to try and fund a book on Lolita.

That Epstein not only read but found some kind of psychological union with Lolita seemed to challenge my defense both of the novel and of reading in the first place. If reading arms us in our intellectual fight against a world corrupted by technology, power, and wealth, how could Epstein’s plane be called the Lolita Express? If reading is so powerful, and beauty is a virtue, how could this canonical novel serve as figurative fuel for abuse and destruction? If the novel has no moral skew, that it piqued the depraved and grotesque heart of such a man seemed an indictment of that very amorality.

Humbert Humbert, awaiting trial for rape and murder and under psychopathic observation, scribbles the notes that become the novel itself in a last-ditch attempt “not to save my head, of course, but my soul.” It dawned on me that Epstein ordered Lolita to his Kindle while awaiting trial because he wanted it to save him, too. I shuddered.

I wanted to believe that Epstein was an unintellectual maniac who had made a bad name for a great work of literature. Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, put it nicely: “More likely, Epstein confused Lolita for some kind of Booker Prize-level version of Penthouse Forum, which is a stupid error.” Lolita is not erotica. The novel teems with irony, not lewdness. What Lolita is “about” can be debated, but what it certainly isn’t about is sex. Reading Lolita as a Fifty Shades for pedophiles is plainly incorrect.

The 50th anniversary edition of the novel had floated with me from college to adult life. The annotations stopped where I had given up in college. I flipped to the back cover. Vanity Fair had called Lolita “the only convincing love story of our century.” John Updike said, “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written.” I began reading the novel again. The novel’s foreword is penned by the fictional John Ray, Jr., Ph.D., a psychiatrist. He introduces the manuscript (Lolita) as Humbert Humbert’s memoir — a memoir, he writes, that does not absolve Humbert from any crime, but rather shows “how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse!” Humbert, in other words, achieves charisma through language. His soul, as one could call it, emerges not just through his mechanically beautiful writing but also in his candor. He doesn’t understand why he has “an excessive desire for that child.” He’s just a guy with a weird kink or, as Harvard professor Elisa New put it in an email to Epstein in 2018, just a “a man changed forever by his impression of a young girl.” So maybe Epstein saw himself in Humbert Humbert: charismatic, flawed, trying his best. The existence of the “manuscript” suggests that maybe Humbert deserves a chance, that everyone has a shot at redemption.

But of course, one knows that Humbert is not simply an eccentric: for the entire duration of the novel, he is raping a child. It occurred to me that perhaps it had been a flaw on Nabokov’s part that the novel was so morally ambiguous. With Humbert at times personable or empathetic, Lolita risks welcoming in the actual Humberts, the Epsteins, of the world. If the novel doesn’t take a side, perhaps the reader doesn’t have to, either. Maybe Lolita could actually corrupt a person. I wanted to find a reason to defend Lolita, to defend reading and studying literature as a path toward universal goodness, but I could not find a way out of the argument that this novel, instead, paved an exit for Epstein.

But I hadn’t really been reading that much lately, anyway; maybe I couldn’t focus the way I could in college. I instead perseverated on questions that seemed more pressing to my newfound adult life: Did I care more about money or having the time to read? Did I care more about my friends or my solitude? When I rose from bed every morning, what, exactly, did I want to spend my time doing? All of these questions I could have answered intellectually in a heartbeat while still an undergrad. Of course I cared more about reading than money. Of course I needed to protect my solitude. Of course I wanted to wake up and read and write. My humanities education supported the idea that reading and writing would cultivate the knowledge to live a true and free life. I thought I had that courage. But two years out of college, I wasn’t working a job I loved, I wasn’t reading enough, and I struggled to get out of bed most mornings.

I had moved to my grandmother’s vacant apartment in Queens, which I had filled with all my lovely books. Yet my predominant feeling was loneliness. I’d always thought of myself as a person of ideas first and a person of the world second. But for the first time in my life, I thought maybe ideas and intellect and reading did not offer the wisdom I had spent four years accumulating. Books began to offer more of an escape than a blueprint for how to actually navigate my life. Should I choose a beautiful life, or should I make sure I can pay my rent? Are these two lives compatible? What is a beautiful life?

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A friend told me there was an Epstein File search tool on the DOJ website, so naturally, I typed in a single word: “Lolita.” What I saw couldn’t possibly validate the goodness of aesthetic bliss. In fact, it made the very existence of such an experience, if it did exist, gruesome. There were photos of unnamed women with various lines of Lolita written on smooth-skinned body parts. The following line had been written on a woman’s chest in black marker:

“Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.”

I learned in class that Humbert’s fixation on the name “Lolita” as a purely sonic experience in the opening line of the novel is a quintessential moment of aesthetic bliss. But I determined, after seeing this photo, that if Epstein did experience aesthetic bliss when reading Lolita, when reading this line, the experience was a corrupt and hideous one that made him a worse person, or justified his worse intentions. This was the fault of the novel. The photo confirmed that.

I could definitively no longer see the novel’s goodness. I don’t know why I kept reading, then. Maybe it was the old humanities student in me who just wanted to finish the book in spite of my disillusionment. I made it past the first line and into the first dozen pages. I reached the scene where Humbert watches Lolita play tennis.

And sure enough, I felt something I had certainly never felt while reading Lolita in college: an eerie union with Humbert. “Drenched in a painful convulsion of beauty assimilation,” Humbert says, and the novel touched my heart, too. Yellow-tinted summer memories suddenly resurfaced as I trudged my way through the horrific story. I had a sudden, terrible thought — not that my brief resonance with the novel made me bad — but that my proxy, that Epstein, was perhaps was more human than I had given him credit for, that he truly had connected with the novel in the way Nabokov had intended, in the way I was now in “aesthetic bliss.” The novel itself, then, hadn’t corrupted Epstein — not as much as beauty had. Was Lolita an indictment of beauty?

I closed the book and returned to the DOJ search tool. I wanted to play around with it more. Epstein, of course, reminded me of Humbert, but they both reminded me of another character I had also encountered in college: Milton’s sympathetic antihero, Satan. In Book IV of Paradise Lost, Satan admits, “Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell.” I entered “devil” into the search bar, and what populated the search results was an interview in which Epstein is asked by a man behind the camera (Steve Bannon), “Do you think you’re the devil himself?” Epstein responds, “No, but I do have a good mirror.”

Humbert repeatedly admits to his crimes, to his “excessive desire for that girl,” but he cannot keep his nymphet, he does not succeed in love, and both Humbert and Dolores wind up dead by the end of Lolita. I was bored by the novel on my first read because Nabokov writes Humbert in such a way that he has no revelations, no change, no growth at all despite his obsession with beauty. Like Satan, Humbert cannot keep the beautiful thing; instead, he seeks to destroy it. In the face of beauty, both Satan and Humbert remain as they were, if not more monstrous. Both creatures’ love for beauty is corrupted — beauty motivates them to harm.

The memories evoked for me in reading the novel, though, never felt contaminated that way. I remembered those summer days. I remembered Central Park in its lush green glory. I remembered feeling the sun’s warmth on my tanned legs. I remembered a pure, crisp red apple in a napkin. And what I remembered most were feelings of tenderness and kindness, feelings so strong that they endured well beyond the summer’s end.

Yet I never felt the desire to rectify those moments. Even though I felt hopeless as I read Lolita, unhappy in my own post-graduate life, I remembered those days and was overcome by a feeling of safety, of comfort, that confirmed the goodness of the past. I was even motivated to create — hence why I am writing about it now. It was as if the beauty and purity of my memories became my own kind of faith, my own kind of hope. I believed in beauty again because it brightened my melancholia, because of aesthetic bliss and its infinite sustenance.

Change happens slowly. One does not wake up and suddenly know all of the answers. On “some distant day,” as Rilke says, we come to understand the resolutions to our deepest questions. Reading Lolita, remembering those moments, and slowly climbing back into a vague world — a world that was waiting for me to return to it nevertheless — felt like a slow, gradual arrival. It turns out your life will not abandon you, even if, for a brief period, you choose to abandon it. What this change looked like for me, materially, is hard to describe because I only realize it now: a lagged epiphany. What I can tell you is that beauty gave me hope, and hope held a mirror to the world. What I saw was goodness.

For Humbert, beauty functions more like a trick mirror than a real one. Humbert’s perspective is distorted: he uses his beautiful language to try and convince the reader of his humanity. Nabokov just gives the atrocity a tuxedo and a good haircut. That the novel uses beauty to both manipulate the reader and soothe the conscience of its sinful narrator is its genius. Nabokov cares little for mirrors. He knows his narrator was too weak to ever come across a real one. Epstein, of course, missed the point.

Lolita’s “meaning” is one degree removed from its characters because there is nothing, contextually, to them; the text resists interpretation in the classic sense: no meaning hides within its pages, its themes, its settings or dialogue. This is precisely Nabokov’s argument: that beauty is not always the truth, but beauty can trick one into believing it is. John Ray, Jr., Ph.D. presents the novel as evidence when, actually, there is none. The novel tricks the trick mirror. Ultimately, Lolita can tell us nothing about its narrator.

There it is! Veritas. Veritas…ver-i-tas: Veritas. I remember the Harvard seal imprinted atop our majestic library, beneath which ran rivers and tunnels of books — 3.5 million in count and 57 miles altogether. So many words, I thought as an undergraduate. So much knowledge. I had the feeling then that I was about to grow to accumulate it. “Enter to grow in wisdom, depart to better serve thy country and thy kind.” What would such wisdom entail? What would I come to know?

There is certainly so much to know: 3.5 million files publicly available in the DOJ’s Epstein Library, to be precise. I think Nabokov would find our attempt to understand a man like Epstein through the archive of his files ludicrous. It is the job of the modern academic, critic, sociologist — reader, even — to glean knowledge from a text’s material: Ezra Klein welcomed a “sociologist of the American elite” onto his podcast in February to dissect what the Epstein Files can show us about Epstein’s “masterful” deception and his “brilliant” ability to craft a global social network. He leads us to understand the emails reveal an “Epstein Class” that “sketches a devastating epistolary portrait of how social order functions.”

Just as I’m writing this, The New York Times pings me, inviting me to watch hours and hours of footage detailing Epstein’s private life. There will certainly be many more nonfiction books and many more podcast episodes and roundtables and think pieces — a full, bloated discourse — on the revelations of the files. Even after his death, Epstein, like Humbert, has convinced the whole world of his importance. How did he pull off such a globally lucrative and scandalous and salacious life? What an impressive, personable devil he was.

We don’t know why Epstein committed his crimes. No amount of novels, documents, or transcripts can bring us closer to the answer. But I couldn’t have known this as an eager young student, gazing upon Widener library. Sitting lonely in my New York apartment, surrounded by books, I felt empty of a true life. Consuming beauty does not bring one closer to the truth. We find truth when literature spurs a moment of aesthetic bliss, when literature touches the soul, and we are motivated to recreate aesthetic bliss for others, for the world. Literature exposes the reader to beauty, but beauty, if truly felt, instills in one the will to change.

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Shortly after my day in Central Park, I was wandering the city, the way jobless post-grads do. Sweating in the heat, I decided to visit Rockefeller Center. By some miracle, I had a job interview at NBC in a few days. My desk would be housed in what is casually known as “30 Rock,” and I thought it might be a good idea to check it out, maybe say a prayer. Please, Lord, let me get the job. I also needed to pee. So I went inside to find a clean bathroom. The gold, sterile lobby blasted air conditioning at me, but there were no directions for the restroom to be found. A security guard kept glancing my way.

“Is there a bathroom near here?” I asked him.

“Have you traveled a lot recently?” he asked in return.

“Yes,” I replied.

“And you’re a writer?” he said.

“Sort of,” I said.

“Don’t tell anyone this,” he said. “But I kind of have psychic powers. That’s how I knew that. The bathroom is that way.”

I exited 30 Rock in a bit of a daze. I should have asked him, “Am I going to get the job?” I kicked myself. What did he mean by his mysterious response? Later that night, while lying in bed after dinner, I told my friend the story.

“What do you think?” I asked him.

He laughed. “I have no idea.”

I didn’t get the job, and my friend moved out west. It’s been almost two years, and I walked past Rockefeller Center just last week and laughed. Was that strange security guard still there? I didn’t know. What did it mean, what he had said to me? But that was never the right question. The better question was how that encounter would change me. It was a question I did not even have the knowledge, at the time, to ask.

We all know love can make us better people, and I wish I could tell you how it happened to me. But I don’t really know. There was an apple on a humid morning, push-ups in Central Park, a weird encounter with a psychic security guard, and then the end of what it was, which remained largely undefined. I don’t know, either, where things went wrong. That knowledge fails me. What matters is that whenever I think upon those few summer days, I still want to love other people.

That is how Lolita is a moral novel, because I read it, and I felt this way.

Lolita did not corrupt Epstein. The only kind of person who sees himself in the infamously odious Humbert Humbert is another Humbert Humbert, an Epstein, someone who, it should be said, would not know a mirror even if he sat before one.

When destruction reaches its last taboo — the violation of young women and girls — justice becomes the desire to create goodness. And when one encounters beauty, they face a choice: to sit “stupidly good” for a second, only to resume exactly as they were, or to seek to make the world more beautiful because it deserves to be made so. There is no beauty without change. There is no meaning beneath the Files, the commodities of scandal, the distractions from justice. Their meaning, and the opportunity for them to do any good, was lost a long time ago.

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