Carolyn: "The viola d'amore is distinguished by two sets of strings, one to be played, the other to vibrate sympathetically."
MR: Fleur de Fyler plays a viola d'amore in PF. /...the 17th C. British writer Joseph Glanvill...the scholar gypsy appears..."I see not why the phancy of one man may
not determine the cogitation of another rightly qualified, as easily as his bodily motion. This influence seems to be no more unreasonable,then that of one string of a Lute upon another; when a stroak on it causeth a proportionable motion in the sympathizing connort, which is distant from it and not sensibly touched."

VN was a keen observer, also these vibrational phenomena are usually studied at the level of high-school physics, and he must have been familiar with these "echoes" even before he encountered their poetic rendering in Arnold or Glanvill. Their verse, as in the quotation above, establishes the way to correspondences viewed by other "synasthetics". Probably, as we gather from SO, VN was familiar with the French symbolists from an early age ( Rimbaud, for eg, whom I brought up long ago with "Voyelles" or "Le Bateau Ivre",and didn't check now for the explicit link with Ada).

To remind you,though, I'll repeat some lines from Les Fleurs du Mal ( would these poems be related to his choice of the name Fleur de Fyler?), from the sonnet Les Correspondences:

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Il est des parfums frais comme des chairs d'enfants,
Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
- Et d'autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

We may think that VN would be doubly interested about this kind of poetic rendering of a divided soul, good and evil, beautiful and corrupt. "Les Correspondances", such as outlined by Charles Baudelaire, deal openly with the theme of "Et in Arcadia Ego" ( Ego, here, pointing not only to death but, as in PF,"dementia"). The twins, the doppelgänger, the mirrors of Terra and Anti terra, the sky reflected in the muddy puddles... these contrasting realities are always present in VN's writings.

I seldom agree with those ( I remember Rorty, but I may be wrong) that emphasize VN's "spirituality" as resulting only from elevated thoughts or high visions, the kind that only resolve themselves, at last, in what is lovely, good and positive, with the exclusion of evil..

( By the way, could anyone inform me about Edmund Wilson - with whose work I'm not familiar enough except for "Axel's Castle", that I don't remember, and" To the Finland Station", which I was too lazy to read - and tell me where, among his published works, has he written positively about Nabokov and also where we read his public criticism against VN? )

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