“Everything in the world plays: the blood in the veins of a lover, the sun on the water, and the musician on a violin.
“Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and family jests—is play. And when we actually play—whether we’re knocking down a tin battalion with a pea or drawing together across the net barrier in tennis—what we feel in our very muscles is the essence of that play which possesses the marvellous juggler, who tosses from hand to hand in an unbroken sparkling parabola … the planets of the universe.
“Man has played as long as he has existed. There are ages—holidays of humanity—when man is especially impassioned by games. So it was in bygone Greece, in bygone Rome, and so it is in our own Europe of today.”
—Vladimir Nabokov’s ringside vision of life, published for the first time in English in the Times Literary Supplement.