>---------------------------------------------------------- >Editor's
Assignment: "Why did the chicken cross the road?
"My dear sir, she was
hardly a chicken. But be that as it may, there's no mystery about it. She was on
her way to the letter box, poor thing. Of course if she hadn't gone, there would
have been a calamity of an entirely different sort. An entirely different sort
indeed." - Humbert Humbert
"It didn't know its alternatives, and it
couldn't see the horse." - Luzhin
"Pada galu rode gals here the gull tous
thi side the gala says tell your father not to----" - Aunt Maude
"By the
merest quirk of fate, the chicken did indeed cross the road. But it was a
different chicken." - Sebastian Knight
"We know that it crossed the road
because life on the other side of the road was Nabokov's overarching theme. But
re-re-re reading makes it clear that it was actually the chicken's ghost that
crossed the road." - Brian Boyd
"Oh that's sidesplitting. Now would you
mind making a u-turn? I'm starving." - Dolores
"That can be easily
explained, though she hardly knew herself. To do otherwise was impossible. Can't
you see? Oh if I had any germ of genius in me, if I been given a bit of creative
power, I could have put into words the precise thoughts of the chicken, but as
it is I can only improvise: Higgledy-piggledy, Out of my way you there! Birds of
the future will stop for no cars.... Would a better life await her on "the other
side"? Yes, and as the years roll on, with the lapse of time, before we know it,
or after, as the case may be, life grows better; provided it comes to be what it
already is for some and what it one day will be for all. She must go to Ryazin
and open a coop." - Chernyshevsky
"An alluring riddle. I must rack my
brains. Not to grace my table, that's for sure, under the cloying
béchamel, with Gallo wine, did she, over worn pavement aflutter streak for
the sake of wearisome yokels. Ah Greta! Your dainty ways I remember
well. The simple curve of your neck, your dark thighs and your white bosom
that tempted so many - these beguiled me not. But your immolodious
voice, and the innocent games we played! Questions, intense cogitations,
and a flurry of head scratching. . . but no answers. I'm probably
senile. But it seems at one time I knew. . . ." - Plushkin