Stan K-B: This debate is
increasingly confusing! Let's note once again that the PREY deceives while the
PREDATOR strives to avoid being deceived. Getting things wrong is bad for both
sides. Note, predators are often also prey as you move up the food chain.
Learning to eat without being eaten is a constant force in Natural Selection
[...] Speaking of Man as predator, the counter-productive irony is that the
water-blobbed wing might prove irresistible to VN's net..
JM: I was reminded of another cute
exchange, from St. Exupery's 1943 "The Little Prince":
The fox
seemed perplexed, and very curious.
"Are there hunters on that planet?"
"No"
"Ah,
that's interesting! Are there chickens?"
"No"
"Nothing is perfect," sighed the fox.
I bet VN netted more
butterflies and moths than a swarm of sharp-sighted birds
or lonely toads. Besides, VN was
not hunting familiar beauties while engaged in registering
recurrent patterns or demarcating
differences... It would
nice to find, in the history of science's recent developments, a
text like the one J A seemed to inquire about, titled: "The idea of
God and the proofs of his existence in Nabokov", along the lines
of François Picavet's "The idea of God in the philosophy of St.
Anselm" or Koyré's "The idea of God and the proofs of his
existence in Descartes".
I bring up again Stephen Blackwells
indications: On Nabokov's physics, see also
Robert Grossmith, "Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in
Nabokov's Bend Sinister". Russian Literature TriQuarterly (Ann
Arbor, MI), 24, 1991, pp. 151-162.
See
also S.Blackwell , "The Poetics of
Science in, and around, Nabokov's The Gift", The Russian Review,
Russian Review. 62 (2003): 243-61[...] and Marina Grishakova's The
Models of Space, Time and Vision in V. Nabokov’s Fiction: Narrative Strategies
and Cultural
Frames. Tartu: Tartu UP,
2006.