Sandy Klein reports: "Returning to
flight / Efforts of New England biologists help usher in rebirth of the
endangered Karner blue butterfly"
Complete article at following URL: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/09/14/returning_to_flight/
...Vladimir Nabokov netted his first Karner near Albany in 1950,
according to the book "Nabokov's Butterflies," but by then the population was
declining. "I hope, after all of our work, that it's able to hang
on," he said. "It's real a survivor, I think, and it's a wonderful
little animal to have in our life."
JM: My heartfelt wishes for the
preservation of nature, and the Karners, include the wish to find
that this "wonderful little animal" may have his life for itself,
too, along with other less wonderful ones.
JA: Bootle's points are
marvelous. I've had something like that same thought about the "stranger",
"danger" myself as well as another of Nabokov's when discussing Gogol: namely
the "cosmic" and the "comic" are separated by one letter.
JM: The comic and the cosmic are simultaneously separated
and approached by this one letter., clashing and blending. Just like "zany". I
wonder if VN could have been searching for... a prime word? See, I could not avoid hearing, in "zany", the zanily hidden
"zenith" in:
p.99 "can't you see that
happiness at its very best is but the zany of its own
mortality?"
To feel reassured about my choice ( how would V
have pronounced "zenith"?), I dikigoogled "zany" and "zenith".
The word zenith derives from the inaccurate reading
of the Arabic word samt ('path'), pronounced sent, by scribes in the
Middle Ages (during the 14th century), in the expression samt arrās ('path above
the head'). Perhaps VN's vision of
transcendence is not resultant from the ardis of time when
shot in a straight ascending line: could it
be...spherical? VN was quite sensitive
to "verbal surroundings", as in p.117: "fatal split between
Knight the artist and the great booming world about him" - (a circular fissure,
obvisously)