This Naked Flame of Suffering

...as much as it may sound like it, is not a line from an Arcade Fire song. It's from The Word, a short story by Vladimir Nabokov, in next week's New Yorker (International Fiction Issue).

The flowers spilled their humid sheen in flight; the sleek, bright beasts played, whirling and climbing; the birds chimed with bliss, soaring and dipping. I, a blinded, quaking beggar, stood at the edge of the road, and within my beggar’s soul the selfsame thought kept prattling: Cry out to them, tell them—oh, tell them that on the most splendid of God’s stars there is a land—my land—that is dying in agonizing darkness.