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THOUGHTS: four from CHW
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THOUGHTS
1.
Past mention of the juniper tree in the quad, and Ronnie Knox’s memorable
limerick, led me to skim through his “Let Dons Delight”. Because it was
described “as variations on a theme in an Oxford common-room: a mildly fantastical
series of reveries of incidents dreamed by a sleeping don from 1588 to 1938
at periods of 50 years”, published in 1939 and re-issued in 1958, I thought
VN might perhaps have echoed it among his barking, biting dons in PF. Apart
from a faint resonance in one of the dons commenting that his reverie had been
interrupted when, through a window, “selections from the music of Snow White
were pouring in, reproduced in a very raucous manner by an undergraduate’s
gramophone …. It marked the familiar point at which external reality begins to
invade our dreams”, it seemed too Oxford and too pre-WWII, to have supplied
VN with much matter applicable to Wordsmith. A character’s quote from Knox’s
“Essays in Satire”, reproduced on the dust-jacket, seemed amusing, however:
“Facts are only steam which obscures the mirror of truth”.
2.
With MR drawing the list’s attention to E. Darwin’s "Loves of the Plants: A
Poem with Philosophical Notes", I was struck by the coincidental mention, on
another list, of another long C18th poem, Henry Baker's (1698-1774) "The
Universe - A Poem Intended to Restrain the Pride of Man " and its reference to
the butterfly as a symbol of salvation:
How Glorious now! How chang'd since Yesterday!
When on the Ground, a crawling Worm it lay,
Where ev'ry Foot might tread its Soul away.
Who rais'd it thence? And bid it range the Skies?
Gave its rich Plumage, and its brilliant Dyes?
'Twas God: - It's God and thine, O Man, and He
In this thy Fellow-Creature lets Thee see,
The wond'rous Change which is ordain'd for Thee. (ll. 430-437)
3.
Recently quoted: Author Vladimir Nabokov said in a 1969 New York Times
interview that "there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some
sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket." Am I alone in finding this
apparent advocacy of sign language by a master of the written word slightly
sad? Perhaps VN was merely reflecting that some of his readers seemed unable to
tell when he was joking.
4.
JF asked: What language is "Kongs-skugg-sio" supposed to be, Zemblan? This
language is Danish/Norwegian. Konungs Skuggsja is Swedish. The expression might
be translated King’s Shadow - ? The sio/sja element is slightly obscure:
perhaps shadow-play, shadow-world, phantasmagoria, reflection, mirror.
Charles
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