Sandy Drescher wrote:

 

Interestingly, birds, like many humans, do not inhibit this instinctive behavior in response to life experience - reflection being  absent from their learning strategies.

Nice point. 

 

For what it’s worth, in turn,  I’ve just been watching the Howard Hughes flick, Hell’s Angels, 1930, and I wondered if VN ever saw it. The aerial combat scenes of WWI biplanes reminded me of hordes of butterflies filling the sky; and I can’t forget the jaw-dropping sight of two of them crashing straight into each other in mid-air, and dropping to the ground. This must have been when two of the three pilots who died during the filming came to their ends. Not wholly unreminiscent of the wax-winged Icarus, Yeats, Auden, Carlos Williams and the Breughel painting.

 

As has already been remarked, part of the power of Pale Fire is its amazing ability continually to remind one of something else in one’s own reading or experience. I feel I must now re-locate the instances of air crashes recounted in its pages.

 

Charles