Lolita

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During the course of conversation someone mentioned the name of E.T.A. Hoffmann and those musical tales. The Countess Beata, our young hostess, put down the orange she was about to peel and said to the young poet “Would you believe it — his stories — and I only seldom read them — can keep me awake all night long? My rational mind tells me it is fantasy, and yet…”

“Perhaps it is not mere fantasy, my dear countess.”

The diplomat gave a good natured chuckle “You don’t think such outlandish things actually happened to Hoffmann, do you?”

“But that is exactly what I do think,” countered the poet. “They did happen to him. Of course I don’t mean that he saw them with his own eyes. But because he was a poet, he experienced everything that he wrote psychically. Perhaps I should say that he only wrote of things that he had encountered in his soul. In fact I would say that this is what differentiates the poet from the writer. The poet’s soul experiences the fantastic as its reality.”

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