Bookbag: "You are my mask."

From Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff:

In 1945, Katharine White at The New Yorker expressed concern over his taste for obsolete language; she inferred that he had learned his English directly from the OED. For good reason Harold Ross swore he would cut his own throat if Vladimir Nabokov were to become a professor of English.

To give you an idea of Schiff's style, the next paragraph begins "Ross had a while still to live."

Other notable sentences include:

Vera did not remove the mask [a black satin one; Nabokov had gotten his first glimpse of Vera at a masquerade ball, so she wore a mask to their first arranged meeting.—CSB] in the course of the initial conversation, either because she feared her looks would distract from her conversation (as has been suggested), or (as seems more consistent with female logic) because she feared they might not.

Nabokov complained he was afflicted by total recall, an affliction of which he could be miraculously cured by the presence of a biographer.

And the only one I can foresee myself stealing someday:

Possibly Vera was taking a page from the international handbook of intellectual coquetry.

Vera eventually took off her disguise:

In a 1924 letter Nabokov had asked her to describe what she was wearing. He was pleased by her response; he could picture her perfeectly, so well that he was impatient to remove several items. Furthermore she had included an unnecessary accessory in her description. "But you really wouldn't dare wear a mask," chided Nabokov, when the two had known each other for precisely eight months. "You are my mask."

Masks, forms, translation; a literary romance. Love is the place where people of my generation are most inclined to be freewheeling and least content to work off a script, but consider this line of verse composed for Vera by Nabokov during the first year of their courtship: Diving you notice all, / all night's silhouetted games. / I start to talk—you answer, / as if rounding off a line of verse. "As if rounding off a line of verse"; I doubt that such a feeling is possible without at least one traditional script in play.