1."The attic. This is the attic. Welcome to the attic. It stored a great number of trunks and cartons...Rolled up in its case was an old ‘jikker’ or skimmer, a blue magic rug with Arabian designs, faded but still enchanting, which Uncle Daniel’s father had used in his boyhood and later flown when drunk [ ] Van who loved that sport bribed a local mechanic to clean the thing, reload its hawking-tubes, and generally bring it back into magic order and many a summer day would they spend, his Ada and he, hanging over grove and river or gliding at a safe ten-foot altitude above surfaces of roads or roofs[ ]"
2. The
pleasure of suddenly discovering the right knack of topsy turvy locomotion was
rather like learning to man, after many a painful and ignominious fall, those
delightful gliders called Magicarpets (or ‘jikkers’) that were given a boy on
his twelfth birthday in the adventurous days before the Great Reaction — and
then what a breathtaking long neural caress when one became airborne for the
first time and managed to skim over a haystack, a tree, a burn, a barn, while
Grandfather Dedalus Veen, running with upturned face, flourished a flag and fell
into the horsepond.
A few quotes from "Pale Fire" related to Dedalus and labyrinths, with an implicit criticism to Aristoteles (or so it seems) aren't helpful to understand what is intended in "Ada".
"Aristotle! — Ah, there would be a
man to talk with! What satisfaction to see him take, like reins from between his
fingers, the long ribbon of man’s life and trace it through the mystifying maze
of all the wonderful adventure.... The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan
simplified by a look from above — smeared out as it were by the splotch of some
master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful
straight line." (CK line 810: A web of
sense)
I have no idea about how the Christian demons (related to Lucifer and his "Fall" after a rendering, in the King James version of the Bible, of a Hebrew word in the book of Isaiah 14:12 ) are linked to the protective "daemons"(daimons)* V.Nabokov's references to Dementyi's nickname, Demon, and his links to evil doings and to mythological Dedalus are quite a puzzle, as are his "angels,"** here unrelated to the splendorous entities described in his Russian short-stories.
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* Wikipedia: From Latin daemon (“genius, lar, guardian spirit”), from Ancient Greek δαίμων (daimon, “dispenser, god, protective spirit”). [ ] "Christian tradition, influenced by the Jewish presentation of the passage of Isaiah as applicable to Satan, came to use the Latin word for "morning star", lucifer, as a proper name ("Lucifer") for Satan as Satan was before his fall. As a result, "Lucifer has become a by-word for Satan in the Church and in popular literature", as in Dante Alighieri's Inferno and John Milton's Paradise Lost. However, the Latin word lucifer kept its original positive sense for Christians [ ] and its appearance in the Easter Proclamation as a description of Jesus.
** - "Revelation can be more perilous than
Revolution. Sick minds identified the notion of a Terra planet with that of
another world and this ‘Other World’ got confused not only with the ‘Next World’
but with the Real World in us and beyond us. Our enchanters, our
demons, are noble iridescent creatures with translucent talons and mightily
beating wings; but in the eighteen-sixties the New Believers urged one to
imagine a sphere where our splendid friends had been utterly degraded[ ]
while on the opposite side of the cosmic lane a rainbow mist of angelic spirits,
inhabitants of sweet Terra, restored all the stalest but still potent myths of
old creeds...."