Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0015630, Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:48:07 +0100

Subject
Re: query: serenity and trinity
Date
Body
On 30/10/07 04:19, "b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ" <b.boyd@AUCKLAND.AC.NZ> wrote:

> A query: does the pairing of serenity and trinity suggest anything to anyone?
> I am compiling the next instalments of ADA annotations, to I.28, and wonder
> why VN's Trinity's Great Court becomes Van's Serenity Court. Googling
> "serenity trinity" provides the most bizarre conjunctions, beginning with the
> imaginary queendom of Serenity Trinity, continuing with Serenity Trinity
> garden plaques for crematoria, and so on, but offering no common thread to
> their conjunction that I can grasp.
>
> Brian Boyd
>
> Prof. Boyd: some unfiltered reactions:
>
> To most Cantabrigeans, TRINITY does not have its original (1546) theological
> connotations. Neither do JESUS and CHRIST colleges! They become sort-of
> everyday toponyms divorced from their roots.
>
> Hence my feeling that any links in VN¹s ever-un-obvious mind from Trinity to
> Serenity (have we dismissed Œmere¹ assonance) may be unrelated to religious
> matters. Indeed, the Trinitarian doctrine, dangerously rejected as polytheist
> blasphemy by Isaac Newton, Trinity¹s leading light, has a long bloody,
> distinctly non-serene role in Church history. This path connects Trinity and
> Serenity but only as ANTONYMS! And even more so, if we recall that the A-bomb
> test of July 16 1945 was code-named TRINITY.
>
> Then again, mundanely: during VN¹s and my residence, the Great Court of
> Trinity was indeed dripping with the epitome of sereneness! On my last visit,
> though, tourist-throngs disturbed the peace. Some dared to keep on the grass.
> Off with their heads!
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle
>
> PS: Sighted while browsing:
>
> From Trinity College website. VN in good company!
>
> Famous figures associated with Trinity in the late 19th and early 20th
> centuries include James Clerk Maxwell, author of the theory of
> electromagnetism; J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford, two of the pioneers of
> atomic physics; the historian G.M. Trevelyan; philosophers Bertrand Russell
> and Ludwig Wittgenstein; Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India;
> and the novelist Vladimir Nabokov.


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