A half-empty package of Gauloises cigarettes can be made out between the ink bottle and an overful ashtray. Family photos are propped against the four volumes of Dahl's Russian dictionary. The end of my robust, dark-brown penholder (a beloved tool of young oak that I used during my twenty years of literary labors in Europe and may rediscover yet in one of the trunks stored at Dean's, Ithaca, N.Y.) is already well chewed.
Nabokov Novel Writing from his hotel room with his penholder.
From Speak Memory
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, Everyman's Library: 1999. First published in 1951.
My writing hand partly conceals a stack of setting boards. Spring moths would float in through the open window on overcast nights and settle upon the lighted wall on my left. In that way we colleted a number of rare Pugs in perfect condition and spread them out at once (they are now in an American musuem). Seldom does a casual snapshot compendiate a life so precisely.
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