I tremble at the idea I might send you on another merry-go-round chase for a motif, but the one shoe motif in Cindarella, which you associate with Shade's brown shoe, in folklore appears (the argument is made by Carlo Ginsburg in his Storia notturna 1989, esp.Pt3.2 pp.208ff) to refer to death.

ps. an epistemological point. If Nabokov had read Joyce, but dismissed the 'nail paring' as coincidental, not intended and thus not allusive, does this mean that in writing in that motif in Pale Fire, the famous Dedalean antecedent was not present in his mind? If it wasn't, despite the fact that the analogy of the writer to God and nail pairing in Portrait was widely almost tiresomely quoted in the critical literature, then where does this leave Nabokov's own authorial control over the meaning of his text?

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