Dear List,
Sometimes long messages are bothersome, but since most of the lenght comes from quotations, I'll keep isolating these from my own comments using colored letters. There are lines I could not locate ( I don't have a digital "Speak, Memory", so I mention them relying on my own very faulty memory).

"The newspaper reader's face had been atrociously injured in the recently mentioned explosion, and all the art of plastic surgery had
only resulted in a hideous tessellated texture with parts of pattern and parts of outline seeming to change, to fuse or to separate, like fluctuating
cheeks and chins in a distortive mirror."

(a) General Ivan Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman, with lands in the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still lovingly called 'Russian' Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and organically, with 'Russian' Canady, otherwise 'French' Estoty...

(b) Darkbloom's notes at the end: p.9. granoblastically: in a tesselar (mosaic) jumble; (c). "... he went on ranting that way for a couple of minutes and then literally fell at her feet, kissing her feet, imploring her pardon, and for a little while longer she kept gazing at him pensively...Those were the fragments of the tesselation, and there were others, even more trivial; but in coming together the harmless parts made a lethal entity..."

What called my attention some time ago was this same word, as used by Nabokov (a reminiscent character in Speak, Memory), in order to describe the feel of "tesselation" against his lips when he kissed his veiled mother. Since then, the term acquired rather ominous associations, beside "texture" or some "web-textile".

The second mention is in relation to the word "parapet" ( B.Boyd called our attention to Ada's addressing Lucette as "pet" in contrast to the French "pet". I want to add another "sonorous" variation for "pet" (as "breast", "pectus") since "parapet" is place to "lean the breast on", as you find in English under "breastwork or window sill". In Portuguese we have the connection very clear ( parapet/parapeito; window sill/peitoril, and peito/breast).

(a) Let us touch this and look at this. In the faint light (of the moon? of his tears? of the few lamps the dying fathers of the city had lit from a
mechanical sense of duty?) his hand found a certain pattern of roughness: a furrow in the stone of the parapet and a knob and a hole with some moisture inside - all of it highly magnified as the 30,000 pits in the crust of the plastic moon are on the large glossy print which the proud selenographer shows his young wife. On this particular night, just after they had tried to turn over to me her purse, her comb, her cigarette holder, I found and touched this - a selected combination, details of the bas-relief. I had never touched this particular knob before and shall never find it again. This moment of conscious contact holds a drop of solace. The emergency brake of time. Whatever the present moment is, I have stopped it. Too late...Krug - for it was still he - walked on...

(a) A low wall of gray stone, waist-high, paunch-thick, built in the general shape of a transversal parapet, put an end to whatever life the roadstill had as a town street. A narrow passage for pedestrians and cyclists divided the parapet in the middle, and the width of that gap was preserved beyond it in a path which after a flick or two slithered into a fairly dense young pinewood. You and I had rambled there many times on gray mornings,when lakeside or poolside lost all attraction; but that evening, as usual, I terminated my stroll at the parapet, and stood in perfect repose, facing the low sun, my spread hands enjoying the smoothness of its top edge on both sides of the passage. A tactile something, or the recent ra-ta-tac, broughtback and completed the image of my twelve centimers by ten-and-a-half bristol cards, which you would read chapter by chapter whereupon a great pleasure, a parapet of pleasure, would perfect my task: in my mind there arose, endowed with the clean-cut compactness of some great solid--an altar! a mesa!--the image of the shiny photocopier in one of the offices of our hotel. My trustful hands were still spread, but my soles no longer sensed the soft soil. I wished to go back to you, to life...and I could not...I must have hung in a spread-eagle position for a little while longer before ending supine on the intangible soil ( 235,236).

(b) She was awfully eager to read the rest of the manuscript, but that fragment ought to be scrapped...marred by a fatal philosophical flaw....I had described a person in the act of imagining his recent evening stroll. A stroll from point H (Home, Hotel) to point P (Parapet, Pinewood). Imagining fluently the sequence of wayside events--child swinging in villa garden, lawn sprinkler rotating, dog chasing a wet ball. The narrator reaches point P in his mind, stops--and is puzzled and upset (quite unreasonably as we shall see) by being unable to execute mentally the about-face that would turn direction HP into direction PH... "His mistake," she continued, "his morbid mistake is quite simple. He has confused direction and duration. He speaks of space but he means time.His impressions along the HP route (dog overtakes ball, car pulls up at next villa) refer to a series of time events, and not to blocks of painted spacethat a child can rearrange in any old way. It has taken him time--even if only a few moments--to cover distance HP in thought. By the time he reaches P he has accumulated duration, he is saddled with it! Why then is it so extraordinary that he cannot imagine himself turning on his heel? Nobody can imagine in physical terms the act of reversing the order of time. Time is not reversible. (252)

(b) The King, now at the most critical point of his journey, looked about him, scrutinizing the few promenaders and trying to decide which of them might be police agents in disguise, ready to pounce upon him as soon as he vaulted the parapet and made for the Rippleson Caves...Nitra and Indra (meaning "inner" and "outer"), two black islets that seemed to address each other in cloaked parley, were being photographed from the parapet by a Russian tourist, thickset, many-chinned, with a general's fleshy nape. His faded wife...

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.