Ocean rain, machine. The waves are big, like passing trucks, and the wind grabs like an aluminum sail. I am looking at the world Nabokov renders in my mind, the world of, so far, an abhorrent self.  That, in self lies empathy. I should save your life, machine, and take you inside, this blowing, wet weather is not for you.   The deep immersion into the first person generates empathy.  Or, I am a too-compassionate reader. I am reading for what it would be to be the writer, to ask where it comes from. Everywhere, is the answer I am getting. I am thinking of Wingstroke, of Kern stewing in aching love and yet expressing himself in precisely the opposite manner, with his curt request, and cold-rewritten letter.  And the story. Like a partly unraveled tassel, the shape of the insane mind. I set the story in the Chautauqua upstate New York, the most certainly haunted place I have ever been. That way I can hear the floors creak when the characters move about. This schism between Kern and his expression of himself, it ruins him, but does it transform him? Is the be-mazed, laughing Kern of the end of the story, the same prim man who gazed twice at the magazine picture of his dead former wife? With his tame patent leather lace-up shoes. I see them light blue-grey, and shiny, his thin wool socks turned down at the ankles.

Wingstroke appears in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov