PALE FIRE, lines 879-885
... where Shade stood in
nightshirt and one shoe./ And then I realized that this half
too/ Was fast asleep; both laughed and I awoke/ Safe in my bed as
day its eggshell broke,/ And robins walked and stopped, and on the damp/
Gemmed turf a brown shoe lay! My secret stamp,/ The Shade
impress, the mystery inborn.
Dear List,
On Friday, 6 June, Stan K-Bootle wrote about 999
lines and also on 1001 while mentioning "mathematical modulo terms".
I've been trying to puzzle it out with the aid of
my son, while we draw butterfly wings and count lines, verses and
index-cards. He tries to explain the mysteries of DIV and MOD and
finds a pattern of corresponding numbers, varying from canto I-IV and
II-III, that are recurrent and an insistent "rest". He even found black and
white oppositions forming lesser squares that ...oh,
well. We checked "Nabokov's Butterflies" to
find those insects which might have shorter upperwings, as in PF's
"butterfly pattern". We found other images and numbers for wings, but "Pale
Fire", the poem, continues to offer an "upside-down"
scheme.
(In the meantime I'm still puzzling out the fourteen
variants inscribed in the 12 index-cards saved from a bonfire in the second
half of July ( 14, plus a non-existent one, for line 822: Fervently would I wish to report that the
reading in the draft was: killing
a Zemblan king /
— but alas, it is not so:
the card with the draft has not been preserved by
Shade. )
I thought I might as well share perplexities
and interesting images scanned from N's Butterflies with the wiser List
members...