NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

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the perfect safety of wooed death. Ecstatically one forefeels the vastness of the Divine Embrace enfolding one's liberated spirit, the warm bath of physical dissolution, the universal unknown engulfing the minuscule unknown that had been the only real part of one's temporary personality. When the soul adores Him Who guides it through mortal life, when it distinguishes His sign at every turn of the trail, painted on the boulder and notched in the fir trunk, when every page in the book of one's personal fate bears His watermark, how can one doubt that He will also preserve us through all eternity? So what can stop one from effecting the transition? What can help us to resist the intolerable temptation? What can prevent us from yielding to the burning desire for merging in God? We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins. Line 501: L'if The yew in French. It is curious that the Zemblan word for the weeping willow is also "if" (the yew is tas). Line 502: The grand potato An execrable pun, deliberately placed in this epigraphic position to stress lack of respect for Death. I remember from my schoolroom days Rabelais' soi-disant "last words" among other bright bits in some French manual: Je m'en vais chercher le grand peut-être. Line 502: IPH Good taste and the law of libel prevent me from disclosing the real name of the respectable institute of higher philosophy at which our poet pokes a good deal of fanciful fun in this canto. Its terminal initials, HP, provide its students with the abbreviation Hi-Phi, and Shade neatly parodies this in his IPH, or If, combinations. It is situated, most picturesquely, in a southwestern state that must remain anonymous here. I am also obliged to observe that I strongly disapprove of the flippancy with which our poet treats, in this canto, certain aspects of spiritual hope which religion alone can fulfill (see also note to 549). Line 549: While snubbing gods including the big G Here indeed is the Gist of the matter. And this, I think, not only the institute (see line 517) but our poet himself missed. For a Christian, no Beyond is acceptable or imaginable without the participation of God in our eternal destiny, and this in turn implies a condign punishment far every sin, great and small. My little diary happens to contain a few jottings referring to a conversation the poet and I had on June 23 "on http://www.en8848.com.cn/『原版英语』
my terrace after a game of chess, a draw." I transcribe them here only because they cast a fascinating light on his attitude toward the subject. I had mentioned - I do not recall in what connection - certain differences between my Church and his. It should be noted that our Zemblan brand of Protestantism is rather closely related to the "higher" churches of the Anglican Communion, but has some magnificent peculiarities of its own. The Reformation with us had been headed by a composer of genius; our liturgy is penetrated with rich music; our boy choirs are the sweetest in the world. Sybil Shade came from a Catholic family but since early girlhood developed, as she told me herself, "a religion of her own" - which is generally synonymous, at the best, with a half-hearted attachment to some halfheathen sect or, at the worst, with tepid atheism. She had weaned her husband not only from the Episcopal Church of his fathers, but from all forms of sacramental worship. We happened to start speaking of the general present-day nebulation of the notion of "sin," of its confusion with the much more carnally colored ideal of "crime," and I alluded briefly to my childhood contacts with certain rituals of our church. Confession with us is auricular and is conducted in a richly ornamented recess, the confessionist holding a lighted taper and standing with it beside the priest's high-backed seat which is shaped almost exactly as the coronation chair of a Scottish king. Little polite boy that I was, I always feared to stain his purple-black sleeve with the scalding tears of wax that kept dripping onto my knuckles, forming there tight little crusts, and I was fascinated by the illumed concavity of his ear resembling a seashell or a glossy orchid, a convoluted receptacle that seemed much too large for the disposal of my peccadilloes. SHADE: All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust and Sloth, poetry might never have been born. KINBOTE: Is it fair to base objections upon obsolete terminology? SHADE: All religions are based upon obsolete terminology. KINBOTE: What we term Original Sin can never grow obsolete. SHADE: I know nothing about that. In fact when I was small I thought it meant Cain killing Abel. Personally, I am with the old snuff-takers: L'homme est né bon. KINBOTE: Yet disobeying the Divine Will is a fundamental definition of Sin. SHADE: I cannot disobey something which I do not know and the reality of which I have the right to deny. KINBOTE: Tut-tut. Do you also deny that there are sins? SHADE: I can name only two: murder, and the deliberate infliction of pain. KINBOTE: Then a man spending his life in absolute solitude could not be a sinner? http://www.en8848.com.cn/『原版英语』
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Vladimir Nabokov PALE FIRE BERKLEY
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the card as rigidly as the Fair Cop
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Frank has acknowledged the safe ret
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snowflake settled upon it. "Crystal
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hand is half raised - not to pat Sh
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Retake the falling snow: each drift
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The house itself is much the same.
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How fully I felt nature glued to me
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There was a sudden sunburst in my h
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College astronomer Starover Blue; 1
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Disjointed notes, Insomnia's mean v
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We have been married forty years. A
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Into a wood duck. And again your vo
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In your own study, twice removed fr
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A male hand traced from Florida to
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Of beauty on the cheek, odd gallici
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In the wet starlight and on the wet
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To the newcomer, no reception, no 5
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The earrings from the other's jewel
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With ancestors, and how far up to g
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Found that my bunch of essays The U
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Wickedly folded moth. But in the ca
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If on some nameless island Captain
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Life Everlasting - based on a mispr
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He's in his study writing with a pe
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890 Of hinge-and-screw affair, a st
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Incline big trucks around my jawbon
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I'm reasonably sure that we survive
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That my friend told me of a certain
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Lines 34-35: Stilettos of a frozen
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In the Foreword to this work I have
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and added the information about his
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sunset had turned to the ashes of d
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When planning parents' bedrooms, he
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the social functions available to m
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A few other items concerning John S
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ut they had lost their top hats to
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The Prince did not heed this rather
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Gradus helping the fire brigade to
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Line 101: No free man needs a God W
Page 81 and 82: This tremendous company consisted o
Page 83 and 84: and melancholy clown with a ruff, a
Page 85 and 86: shoes crammed into the bottom compa
Page 87 and 88: actions mentally rehearsed before.
Page 89 and 90: To take a striking example: what ca
Page 91 and 92: aubles and bits of nacre became mic
Page 93 and 94: King. "Well, anyway, take off that
Page 95 and 96: drowned in the Gulf of Surprise. A
Page 97 and 98: government. When finally captured h
Page 99 and 100: 18). On another trip to the bathroo
Page 101 and 102: his house, a white flower in his bu
Page 103 and 104: poltergeist ran out of ideas in con
Page 105 and 106: course of the last four or five day
Page 107 and 108: cousins (two guardsmen disguised as
Page 109 and 110: annals of plot and counterplot anyt
Page 111 and 112: "Please, go," said poor Bretwit. "I
Page 113 and 114: This barn, or rather shed, where "c
Page 115 and 116: words had been slowly spelled out,
Page 117 and 118: DAUGHTER (exploding) Why must you s
Page 119 and 120: commented here. Southey liked a roa
Page 121 and 122: mentioned his eagerness to see Lave
Page 123 and 124: admirable passage by the much flabb
Page 125 and 126: part, dreadful outbursts of temper.
Page 127 and 128: As one watched the light on her fac
Page 129 and 130: accurately water temperature from c
Page 131: general atmosphere of a subtropical
Page 135 and 136: SHADE: Why must one always quote St
Page 137 and 138: The last syllable of "Tanagra" and
Page 139 and 140: This describes rather well the "cha
Page 141 and 142: This line, and indeed the whole pas
Page 143 and 144: Thy love was far more better than T
Page 145 and 146: sentimental military duets at event
Page 147 and 148: polite note congratulating him on h
Page 149 and 150: Lines 734-735: probably ... wobble
Page 151 and 152: misprint to tally with Shade's "whi
Page 153 and 154: oorish of me to refuse playing with
Page 155 and 156: palace, and crossed the mountains,
Page 157 and 158: The victim falters and the victor f
Page 159 and 160: So this is all treacherous old Shad
Page 161 and 162: He strolled back and paid the equiv
Page 163 and 164: forced to visit the washroom as soo
Page 165 and 166: hurriedly fumbling at the car door,
Page 167 and 168: ut then I noticed he was resting, n
Page 169 and 170: He had worked for two years as a ma
Page 171 and 172: "Come along, Jack, we'll put someth
Page 173 and 174: my tender treasure. Some of my read
Page 175 and 176: Campbell, Walter, b. 1890, in Glasg
Page 177 and 178: eport on the work in progress, 238;
Page 179 and 180: O'Donnell, Sylvia, nee O'Connell, b
Page 181 and 182: green silk, and carrying a flambeau
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NABOKOV Vladimir - Pale Fire

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