TRTR Chapter VI - page 202, the advantage of a classical education

[alice wellintown]

Reminds me of the famous scene in GE. Dickens, as Nabokov notes, is
the master of imagery. Here, the paranoia of poor Pip is projected.



As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in,
before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those
virtuous days.—an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which
instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever
be lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the
bottom of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a
staringly wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed,
and lay there footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no
more close my own eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish
Argus. And thus, in the gloom and death of the night, we stared at one
another.

What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an
inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I
looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what
a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers', and earwigs from the
market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying
by for next summer. This led me to speculate whether any of them ever
tumbled down, and then I fancied that I felt light falls on my face,—a
disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable
approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a little while, those
extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves
audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little
washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the
chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall
acquired a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I
saw written, DON'T GO HOME.