I would like Don to complement my notes fully. Without his fascinating papers cited below, I could not have figured out these few things--needless to say, there are mysteries even now for me.  -- Akiko
 
92.02: on the other, *tralatitiously* speaking, hand [my italics]: clearly shows who is speaking. Cf. "Easy, you know, does it, son" (Ch. 26).
 
92.06-07: even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath: I do not know the reason, but the narrator suddenly begins to talk about an execution on a guillotine. Together with the "(now Lord) X," he sounds referring to the French Revolution. After a long interval, we are reminded of *The Scarlet Pimpernel* in which Sir Percy and his wife Marguerite, "now Lady X [by marriage]," do secret maneuvers to save her brother, Armand St. Just, from the guillotine.   $B!! (B
 
I wrote before that Sir Percy Blakeney aka Scarlet Pimpernel is probably in "Percy." I could show another thread which might connect *SP* with *TT*. Rereading *SP*, I noticed something I had missed as a child. Marguerite and Armand are too affectionate to each other to be just a brother and a sister. Marguerite says, "Armand was all in all to me! We had no parents, and brought one another up. He was my little father, and I, his tiny mother; we loved one another so. . . " (Ch. 16); "Remember, dear, I have only you [Armand]. . . to . . . to care for me. . ." (Ch. 7). Of course, they are not overtly incestuous. And the criminal "Armand Rave" of Ch. 5 is not incestuous himself, but strangled his boyfriend's incestuous sister. But I feel something more than coincidence in the trio, Percy, Armand and his too loving sister. I suggested before that "Armand Rave" could be from a novel by Jean Genet, but now I think Armand St. Just is more probable.  
 
92.17-19: On the printed page the words "likely" and "actually" should be italicized too, at least *slightly*: Please read Don's "Typographic Poetics: *Transparent Things*" http://www.nabokovmuseum.org/PDF/Johnson.pdf
 
93.01-02: the vegetables of our first picture book: See Don's "Nabokov's Golliwoggs: Lodi Reads English 1899-1909" http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/forians.htm. I would like to just add that the letters in the picturebook are italicized imitating the legs of the vegetables. Don would clarify it.

93.04-06: their spinning *ronde* going faster and faster and gradually forming a transparent ring of banded colors around a dead person or planet: Cf. "The vege-men become frenzied in their dance of vengeance. 'Swifter and swifter twine their clinging feet, / A Dervish dance by color made complete, / Only a tinted whirlpool now they seem, / The whirring sound becomes the storm-wind $B!G (Bs scream. / The yellow light / is blurred to sight, / $B!F (BTis like the nightmare of a troubled dream.'''(*The Vege-Men's Revenge*); "Rings of blurred colors circled around him, reminding him briefly of a childhood picture in a frightening book about triumphant vegetables whirling faster and faster around a nightshirted boy trying desperately to awake from the iridescent dizziness of dream life" (Ch. 26).

93.06: around a dead person or planet: Cf. "from live cells to dead stars" (Ch. 4).

93.07-08: Another thing we are not supposed to do is to explain the inexplicable: sounds to be based on the famous conclusion of *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus*: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."  

93.19-20: (the dead are good mixers, that's quite certain, at least): The dead seem to mix than they used to be, at least. *TT* itself is a good "mixer" which mixes many things from VN's life and works. 

93.21: a bad man but a good philosopher: Some of those who knew Wittgenstein in person would say that.

93.27-30: It is generally assumed that if man were to establish the fact of survival after death, he would also solve, or be on the way to solving, the riddle of Being. Alas, the two problems do not necessarily overlap or blend: I cannot help remembering Wittgenstein: "Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time" (*TLP* 6.4312).