I used to recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful pre-dolorian past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my lurking eye, my ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing  her  Alice-in-Wonderland  hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a pecfection which made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach, with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections fill the gap between the little given and the great promised …

From “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov describes a shameful vice with a terrific prose. He enters the deranged mind of a pedophile who is aware of the insane nature of his actions and attempts to justify them as a search for innocent beauty: “a pecfection which made my wild delight also perfect.”

As in the Garden of Eden, when man fell into temptation, it is the awareness of sexuality what ends with a child’s innocent joy. As Sigmund Freud points out, “We call childhood happy because it does not yet know sexual desire.”