Every Freudian knows that one lapsus often attracts a number
of others. That's what happened to me, after the exchange of a vowel in
"Freiberg," when I tried to connect, without using a long sentence,
Nabokov's discovery about Asian butterflies migrating to the Americas and his
novel ADA [where a lot of geography is
outlined, concerning navigators ( like West/East Vasco da Gama and
North/South African trains), Arctic fur-traders, the Magellan and Bering
straits, Ada's Patagonian references to Verne, aso) ]. So, I made
a quip using Demon's sentence (‘If I could write,’ mused Demon, ‘I
would describe, in too many words no doubt, how passionately, how
incandescently, how incestuously — c’est le mot — art and science meet in
an insect, in a thrush, in a thistle of that ducal
bosquet'.") , together with his pathetic brother's travels in
a counter-Fogg direction.
However, Uncle Dan cannot be considered as a
true representative of "Art" (but
perhaps of greedy marchands and indiscriminating collectors),
nor do Nabokov's migratory butterflies spread out in a
counter-fogg direction. My disoriented sentence should read: "Do Art and
Science meet with Uncle Dan's counter-Fogg travels?" (the
implicit query being: Did Nabokov's emphasis about the direction
chosen by Daniel Veen indicate anything in particular or was it a
simple variation in his references to Verne?)
Mere intuition ( as in my case) isn't enough to warrant the
assumption that somewhere in ADA lurks a description
of Nabokov's butterflies migratory developments.
Please, accept my most humble
apologies...*
...............................................................................................................................................
* - "Lucy: Well, look here! A big yellow
butterfly! It’s unusual to see one this time of year unless, of course, he flew
up from Brazil... I’ll bet that’s it! They do that sometimes, you know... They
fly up from Brazil, and they...
Linus: This is no butterfly... This is a potato
chip!
Lucy:
Well, I’ll be! So it is! I wonder how a potato chip got all the way
up here from Brazil? " (this item has been posted in the Nab-L
once)