-- On Tue, 3/31/09, Matthew Roth <MRoth@MESSIAH.EDU> wrote:
> I think Shade uses preterist in the sense of "one
> whose chief interest or
> pleasure is in the past." This is the first definition
> in Webster's 2nd. I
> connect this sentiment with the following lines where he
> vows "never to
> forget" and his anxiety that "we die every day;
> oblivion thrives . . . on blood-ripe lives."

I feel sure you're right. The overt meaning of "one who
collects cold nests" must be someone who engages in the
largely obsolete hobby of bird's-nest collection. The
nests were warm when birds lived in them; now they're cold,
their only life is in the past--but a preterist will find
them still worth collecting.

> Going back to Canto Two we find, just after
> a discussion of Aunt Maud's decline,
>
> What moment in the gradual decay
> Does resurrection choose? What year? What day?
> Who has the stopwatch? Who rewinds the tape?
> Are some less lucky, or do all escape?
> A syllogism: other men die; but I
> Am not another; therefore I'll not die.
>
> It seems to me that Shade is here asserting that one can be
> resurrected
> before physical death, just as one can die before the body
> dies.

> Notice
> that he doesn't ask, as we might expect, what moment
> Death chooses; rather
> he asks when, during the process of decay-in-life, might
> one "escape"?
> Escape into what? And what would it mean to be "less
> lucky"? The syllogism,
> I believe, is meant to cleverly suggest that when Shade
> dies ("But Doctor, I
> was dead!" "Just half a shade.") at the
> Crashaw Club he becomes another.
> (Other men die; "I was dead"; therefore I became
> another.)

> I don't think Shade realizes all of the implications
> himself, but VN wants us to sort them
> out. But perhaps I'm wrong. If so, I'd be
> interested to hear what others
> think Shade means in lines 209-212.

The overt meaning seems clear to me. At what age is
a person resurrected? If someone dies at ninety, do they
have all the pains and losses of perception and memory at
ninety that they had at that time of life? If not, what
age do they seem? Forty-five? Fifteen? And who decides
what point to "rewind the tape" to?

Of course, we know (in my case because I've been told)
the answer in /Pale Fire/: Aunt Maud still has her aphasia
wherever she is. Though maybe the (presumably) more
knowledgeable and talented Shade will not be stuck with
his sixty-one-year-old body. "Souls shall rise in their
degree." --Browning

This is connected to Shade's question about "the madman's
fate". Are insane people insane when resurrected? If
not, one might ask, in what sense are they the same person?

The next line is unrelated: it asks whether some are
unlucky enough not to have an afterlife, or whether
instead all escape oblivion.

In view of the near-juxtaposition between Shade's question
about one's age in the afterlife and his comment about
not seeing himself as mortal, I hope I can be forgive a
digression. James Merrill put these two together in /his/
long poem (with a mirror and many heroic couplets) about the
afterlife:

"And what age
Does one assume in the next world? THE AGE
AT WHICH IT FIRST SEEMS CREDIBLE TO DIE
Ephraim accordingly, in our propped-up glass,
Looks AS I DID AT 22"

It had never occurred to me till now to wonder how much
influence PF might have had on Merrill's Ouija-board
trilogy.

Incidentally, it might answer Joseph Aisenberg's question
of why Nabokov might have felt he "must not be overexplicit".
In my opinion, this trilogy, especially the second and
third volumes, are awful warnings of the consequences of
explaining too much about one's supernatural beliefs.
"Le secret d'ennuyer est celui de tout dire." --Voltaire
(The secret of being boring is to tell everything.)

Jerry Friedman will say no more.

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