J.A.: [...]
I'm not entirely sure why I think Ada doesn't
quite succeed [...].somewhere after Part one, after we're banished from Ardis,
the book really sags[...] we're left with is a growing sense of aesthetic
polemicism [...] like Nabokov's elbowing Van out of the way to get his own
points in, about translation, about the correct pronunciation of Lolita, about
how Freud was wrong about the meaning of dreams[...] fancily stylized[...] You
do realize that you have tacitly acceded my point. My reading is right, you're
saying, the difference is you like what I'm calling a flaw [...] Ada's such a
funky fantasy infernal girl that we can never quite believe in her, maybe we're
not meant to.
S.K-Bootle:VN and his readers should not use the word “infinite”
without due care & attention. The gap between a finite set (however
large) and even the smallest infinite set (aleph-0) is ... beyond belief
We logicians read V as “OR”; tipped over to ^ it becomes “AND”; on its
side we get > (greater than) and < (less than), where the direction of
“vanishing” (getting smaller) IS SELF-EVIDENT[...] And we still haven’t plumbed
the depths of Pythagorean numerology where V = 5, the number of regular Platonic
polyhedra. These really are the comic-cosmic symmetrical building blocks of the
whole spatial shebang.
[...] If I recall correctly without a-googling, our A
evolved via the Phoenician from the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox’s head which
happened to have a name starting with an A sound.
JM:
JA, indeed! I tacitly acceded your point, with the addition of
"probably" or "apparently" to begin to diverge anew.
My likes and dislikes
are neither technical nor "literary" like in your awesome list
of flaws.
Stan, I count
myself among those who stop counting after number three and
frantically move their fingers to signal infinities of "many-
manies".
Without agoogling I
dare bring up your fellow R.L.Gregory's image of an "Horus-Eye" as
the source for the representation of numbers and fractions.
Egyptian-goddess Isis must have collected a de-finite set of scattred
pieces of Osiris before the couple could produce Horus...
Logicians are great
inspirers of "thoughticons" ( V> < , no W ) to see... a
world in a grain of sand? Now what about holding "Infinity in the palm of
your hand?"
Here is a sample of verbal
transformations that testify to VN's pains concerning "an infinity of
sensation and thought within a finite existence".
In Strong Opinions Nabokov
describes "a boy and a girl, standing on a bridge above
the reflected sunset, and there are swallows skimming by, and the boy turns to
the girl and says to her, "Tell me, will you always remember that
swallow? - not any kind of swallow, not those swallows, there, but that
particular swallow that skimmed by?" And she says, "Of course I will," and they
both burst into tears."
There is a less pungent variant in
TRLSK - for it isV's trivial imagination, not SK's,
who addresses Clare Bishop:" I
would have said: 'Let us
not talk of Sebastian. Let us talk of Paris. Do you know it well? Do you
remember those pigeons? Tell me what you have been reading lately....
And what about films? Do you still lose your gloves, parcels?'."
[ V had been present when SK and Clare
saw a flock of smelly birds metamorphose into stone, wing and into
a "fancily stylized" cold register:'Far too many pigeons,' she said, as we reached the kerb[...] The
groan of a motor-lorry ...sent the birds wheeling across the sky[...]. They
settled among the pearl-grey and black frieze of the Arc de Triomphe and when
some of them fluttered off again it seemed as if bits of the carved entablature
were turned into flaky life. A few years later I found that picture, 'that stone
melting into wing', in Sebastian's third
book.]