There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer. Humbert Humbert (Nabokov) evokes his sexual awakening and  nostalgia for such purity, elusive as the grains of sand that shelters […]