How Vladimir Nabakov opens Chapter Five of his novel Lolita is pure scatology. Imagine "THE DAYS OF MY YOUTH as I look back on them" and probably what comes to mind is something maudlin, in need of Kleenex. Certainly Nabakov agrees, but he chooses to wipe away another bodily substance. Nostalgia tends to blur memory but not for Humbert Humbert. For the author these reminiscences "seem to fly away from me in a flurry of pale repetitive scraps". He reworks this "pages of the calendar falling off" metaphor as the lyrical simile "like those morning snow storms of used tissue paper that a train passenger sees whirling in the wake of the observation car." His genius of observational detail gives "body" as it were to these words in both a literal and metaphorical sense. The reader happily follows the dorsal physicality of memory as the "butt of his joke" or palpable fecal imagery to be easily expelled, flushed away.
What a wise guy he was. And what a masterful writer, too.