Here is a wild compression: "(To) get to the story I want to tell—which does indeed
involve a butterfly...The lepidopteron in question was...a Red Admiral or—a few
last flourishes of Linnaean jargon—a Vanessa atalanta, a butterfly that does not
really belong to the Admiral sub-family (Limenitidinae) of the Brushfoots
(Nymphalidae) at all, but belongs instead to the True Brushfoot sub-family (the
Nymphalinae)....I have seen it only once since arriving here. What made that
lone sighting remarkable to me, though, was neither the butterfly’s beauty nor
its comparative rarity in these woods, but the eerily perfect timing of its
appearance. I was sitting on my porch with two volumes I had recently acquired,
both by Vladimir Nabokov: a first edition of Pale Fire in good condition, which
is not very hard to find, and that Holy Grail of Nabokoviana, a first printing
of the 1970 volume Poems and Problems ... And I had just flipped to that
haunting passage in the former where John Shade is about to cross the road to
his death and a “Red Admirable” (Nabokov preferred the older form of its common
name) emerges suddenly from the junipers and shrubs and whirls around the poet
“like a colored flame” ...then hastily disappears into the shadows of the trees,
when a Red Admiral came coasting towards me, performed three elegantly gliding
circumvolations of my head, briefly came to rest on the arm of my chair, and
then flew off again and quickly disappeared in the shadows of a Chinese Tulip
tree. The coincidence alone would have been
enough to astonish me...Nabokov, as is well known, was a fairly firm believer in
the immortality of the soul, as well as a believer in fate, and he tended to
think that the patterns of our lives are in large part shaped and guided by the
spiritual community of those who have gone before us. In the strange, often
tragic, but also often beautiful symmetries of his own life he thought he could
discern the clear workings of these benign presences...
There are any number of fascinating aspects to the curious
interaction and equally curious demarcation that existed between Nabokov the
lepidopterist and Nabokov the artist...But it is clear from his writings that
his love of Lepidoptera was in part fired by the mysterious grandeur of a
holometabolous species whose life cycle seems to encompass a magical passage
from death to greater life—from the earthbound groping of the larva (in Latin,
after all, a word for ghost or funerary mask), through the golden entombment of
the chrysalis, to the winged liberty and polychromatic glory of the fully formed
imago (the true “image”). An Atlas Moth breaking from its cocoon at the end of
his early story “Christmas,” for instance, clearly figures as an intimation of
life beyond death. A more interesting feature
of Nabokov’s interest in butterflies for me, however, and of his entire career
as a naturalist, was his intuition—at once metaphysical and aesthetic—that
between nature and art there is no ultimate formal difference. Though not in any
conventional sense a religious man...he was certain that the natural world
exhibited innumerable signs of conscious and even somewhat whimsical artistry:
morphological games, almost, patterns of mimicry and delightful complexity that
exceeded any purely evolutionary warrant, and that spoke of a sort of creativity
whose rationale was ultimately aesthetic...There was nothing in Nabokov’s vision
of reality that would have brought his thinking into the vicinity of the current
Intelligent Design movement, with its logically and epistemologically
unverifiable arguments regarding irreducible complexity and its crude
mechanistic deism and its all-too-immanent god of the gaps. For Nabokov,
nature’s design was something he thought he perceived in the sheer surfeit of
the beautiful over the needful, and in the specular play of formal likenesses
and variations among species. It was an aesthetic judgment on the whole of the
natural order, not an empirical claim about certain portions of its
machinery...Whatever the case, his beliefs certainly endowed him with a
limitless capacity for happiness...he was always able to find life to be a
delightful “surprise” and for this reason he was always able to see something
more shining through the veils of the ordinary...And it is this quality of
surprise that lends depth and poignancy (and delight) to all of Nabokov’s art.
Whatever else one makes of his peculiar metaphysics... known to every reflective
child, and forgotten only by adults who have coarsened their intellects...His
was nothing other than the ancient Platonic and Aristotelian sense of
thaumazein—of original rational wonder at existence—transcribed into a new key.
As Wittgenstein said (a pronouncement the implications of which even some of his
most avid admirers seem not to notice), it is not how things are, but that they
are, that constitutes “the mystical.” Where the Intelligent Design theorist
wants us to ponder...(a) richer perspective enjoins us to feel awe before the
sheer there-ness...This is a consciousness of things more aesthetic than
empirical and more spiritual than aesthetic, but at every level it is an
experience of beauty—which is to say, an experience of the utter non-necessity,
the absolute fortuity, of being. Heidegger, in an infuriatingly terse paragraph
in the “epilogue” of his “The Origin of the Work of Art,” correctly rejects as
inadequate those static understandings of beauty that say it resides simply in
form and order and a certain splendor (quod visum placet), and insists on the
ontological dimension of the beautiful. No object, however striking, is
beautiful as a sheer sensuous effect (that is nothing but a neurological
agitation), nor even as an object of intellectual comprehension; it is beautiful
because, in addition to these things, there is the mysterious surprisingness of
its existence, by which it discloses to us being in its advent, or being as
event...It is an enigma written as plainly upon the surface of a twig or a brick
as upon the wing of a butterfly...Even if my encounter with that Vanessa
atalanta was nothing more than a wildly amusing coincidence...—every butterfly
is a Papilio mysteriosus, an emblem and an emissary of being in its familiarity
and infinite strangeness, and all things properly contemplated remind us that,
of themselves, they cannot be. And yet they are."
In the overall mood of the article, dealing with
"happiness and surprise" (Plato/Aristoteles "thaumazein," as the author informs
us) I was reminded of a Nabokov BBC, 1969 interview, Iquite recently
re-read (it's on-line and it can be equally found in SO). Somewhere else a
commentator expressed his doubts concerning Nabokov's words.For him, VN's
confession wasn't true to his experiences - and he
described VN's various ordeals and losses. He forgot that item, VN's talent
to "look at the Harlequins."
James Mossman: Tolstoy said, so they say, that life was a
"tartine de merde" which one was obliged to eat slowly. Do you agree?
Vladimir Nabokov: I've never heard
that story. The old boy was sometimes rather disgusting, wasn't he? My own
life is fresh bread with country butter and Alpine
honey.
Nabokov certainly expected more surprises in the
hereafter.
Thanks to internet( www.nytimes.com/.../boyd-pale.html -), here is the quote
and Brian Boyd's words about it:
" But Shade contains no secrets, no
surprises. No one will ever tell him he is insane. As "Pale Fire" shows
us, he is stability itself, living all his life in his parents' home, in the
same comfortable small academic town, marrying his childhood sweetheart and in
forty years never wavering in his love. He records his undramatic surroundings,
recounts his quiet life, and that is all. No wonder, especially after what we
see (and before what we will see) of Kinbote, that Shade's world can seem
insipid, especially when encased in a verse form that fell out of fashion in
English almost two centuries ago./../ Yet as those opening lines suggest, he can
make the ordinary extraordinary. If there are no surprises or secrets in
him, he finds surprises in his world, in a waxwing's death, in a pheasant's
tracks, in a newspaper clipping (Red Sox Beat Yanks 5-4 / On Chapman's
Homer), in what he dubs an iridule, a rainbow reflected in a cloud from a
thunderstorm in a distant valley: he wants us to see that "we are most
artistically caged." Caged, all the same. Even more crucial to his life and his
poem than the surprises of life are the far greater surprises he suspects around
us. (As he will say to Kinbote in the Commentary: "Life is a
great surprise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one."
[C.549, 225])