torrent

"This interlude had turned the torrent away: it was now running unseen behind a wall of darkness. He remembered other imbeciles he and she had studied, a study conducted with a kind of gloating enthusiastic disgust. Men who got drunk on beer in sloppy bars, the process of thought satisfactorily replaced by a swine-toned radio music. Murderers. The respect a business magnate evokes in his home town. Literary critics praising books of their friends or partisans. Flaubertian farceurs. Fraternities, mystic orders. People who are amused by trained animals. The members of reading clubs. All those who are because they do not think, thus refuting Carthesianism. The thrifty peasant. The booming politician. Her relatives - her dreadful humourless family. Suddenly with the vividness of a praedormital image or of a  brightrobed lady on stained glass, she drifted across his retina, in profile, carrying something - a book, a baby, or just letting the cherry paint on her fingernails dry - and the wall dissolved, the torrent was loosed again."
in Bend Sinister, Nabokov