Sandy Klein sends -Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2011/10/05/stephen-jay-gould-i-have-landed/ with the article by Maria Popova "Remembering One of the Greatest Science Writers of All Time: From Darwin to baseball, or what Nabokov’s butterflies have to do with living the American dream," with two references to Valdimir Nabokov (..."From a fascinating essay on Vladimir Nabokov’s lepidoptery poetically titled 'No Science Without Fancy, No Art Without Facts' to a meditation on Freud’s evolutionary fantasy to a poignant scientific reflection on 9/11, the essays blend a head-spinning spectrum of serious scientific inquiry with the storytelling of fine fiction[...] Gould closes his final essay for Natural History with this moving tribute to his grandfather, all the more profound in light of the author’s own passing shortly thereafter:'Dear Papa Joe, I have been faithful to your dream of persistence and attentive to a hope that the increments of each worthy generation may buttress the continuity of evolution...I have landed. But I also can’t help wondering what comes next'.”), one of them with images of words and butterflies with Nabokov categorical: "Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man."

JM: Thanks, Sandy for this news about the recently reprinted articles by A.Jay Gould in "I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History ." It seems that the two, Gould and Nabokov, were impelled by the same kind of reverence and curiosity. For Nabokov a "next world" must exist in contrast to life's first abyss (cf. Pale Fire, Ada, aso*).

(1):"... we can speak of past time, and in a vaguer, but familiar sense, of future time, but we simply cannot expect a second nothing, a second void, a second blank. Oblivion is a one-night performance; we have been to it once, there will be no repeat. We must face therefore the possibility of some prolonged form of disorganized consciousness..." (with the curious observation about consciousness and pain Van directs to Mr. Rack's infinite 'Rackness': "one thing is certain: the only consciousness that persists in the hereafter is the consciousness of pain.")

(2) "...playwrights, as the greatest among them has shown, are closer to poets than to novelists. In "real" life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void — unless we be artists ourselves, naturally; but in a good play I feel authored, I feel passed by the board of censors, I feel secure, with only a breathing blackness before me (instead of our Fourth-Wall Time)" and the malicious reverent reference to Shakespeare and to Tchekov ..." I feel cuddled in the embrace of puzzled Will (he thought I was you) or in that of the much more normal Anton Pavlovich, who was always passionately fond of long dark hair."

(3) "Space introduces its eggs into the nests of Time: a ‘before’ here, an ‘after’ there — and a speckled clutch of Minkowski’s ‘world-points.’ A stretch of Space is organically easier to measure mentally than a ‘stretch’ of Time. The notion of Space must have been formed before that of Time (Guyau in Whitrow). The indistinguisable inane (Locke) of infinite space is mentally distinguishable (and indeed could not be imagined otherwise) from the ovoid ‘void’ of Time. Space thrives on surds, Time is irreducible to blackboard roots and birdies. ..I cannot imagine Space without Time, but I can very well imagine Time without Space. ‘Space-Time’...One can be a hater of Space, and a lover of Time."
The word-play "the ovoid 'void' of Time" when Time is compared to a bird-nest may be either a slip ( a winking metaphor, as JLBorges once said a propos something else)or a fascinating introductory remark to the complex idea of "Time without Space"