Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025569, Tue, 29 Jul 2014 13:07:26 -0300

Subject
Cosmic decisions
Date
Body
It's strange to find a particular Shade line about plexed artistry and patterns dissolved into a generalization:"Poets,extolling the connectedness of all things, have said that the fall of a flower's petal must disturb a distant star. Let us all be thankful that universal integration is not so tight, for we would not even exist in a cosmos of such intricate binding." (Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millenium,163). I've had an opposite experience a few days ago when I visited the Planetarium in Buenos Aires with the program "Cosmic Collisions," for then even the chosen title became contradictory in terms: there is only chaos in the cosmos and life on earth is a kind of miraculous accident that enables humans to dream of unearthly patternings and search order in ritual dates and numbers.
The variations related to V.Nabokov's birthday have always intrigued me: why hesitate between April 22 and April 23 (just because of W.Shakespeare?) S. Jay Gould however, inspired me to formulate a question. V.Nabokov might have favored the ten-day interval following the original date proposed by Pope Gregory, instead of following the later adhesion of the British or the Russians ("In summary, the Gregoriam reform of 1582 revised the Julian calendar by dropping those "extra" ten days, and then promulgating a rule of leap years to prevent any substantial future inaccuracy [ ]The truly improved Gregorian calendar was quickly accepted thoughout the Roman Catholic world. But in England the whole brouhaha sounded like a Popish plot, and the Brits would be damned if they would go along. Thus England kept the Julian calendar until 1752(...) by which time an "extra" day had accumulated in the Julian reckoning, so Parliament had to drop eleven days [ ] As an English colony America still used the Julian calendar at Washington's birth [ ]Russia did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918 [ ] the Easternn Orthodox chuch has still not accepted the Gregorian calendar [ ]."V.Nabokov's 10-day interval decision might have kept him outside political squabblings...but his American passport states otherwise, if I'm not mistaken...
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