S.K-B [to C.Kunin] before you
drop us all list-wise on matters PaeleoFological, thanks for the "ride,"...I'm
trying hard to recall where VN wrote "I've said all I have to say," to whom and
about which topic. I expect many will rush to remind me [...] I
think you'll agree that the list is entitled to carry on the eternal PF
debate..
SK-B [ to
N-List]..." we must ask if VN is deliberately (and
brilliantly) poking fun at a sad, ageing campus expert-on-Pope with
folie-de-grandeur, unable to match Pope's "heroic" couplets with any consistency
[...] In the context of a drowning daughter, each word is so drowned in bathos
as to be Nabokov at his "cruel best."....
JM: I'm unable to refer you
to any Nabokov page but, by sheer coincidence, Freud used exactly the
same words ( "I've said all I have to say") in one of his
letters to Martha Bernays (btw:they were written in German).
I seem to recollect having
encountered them again, and quite recently ( G.W.Bush on
Guantánamo bay?).
I suppose this means that there's a truth lurking
behind them (cf. VN's Law of Coincidences) or, to be
more precise, three different kinds
of truth.
Concerning our entitlement to an eternal debate on PF
or "over tease-levels of
Nabokovian discourse", all I can say is that I hope it shall
be continued in heaven, before it becomes one beautiful straight line,
of course.
[Cf. CK's note to line 810: "And if I had
passed into that other land, whom would I have sought? ...Aristotle! — Ah, there
would be a man to talk with! ... The crooked made straight. The Daedalian plan
simplified by a look from above — smeared out as it were by the splotch of some
master thumb that made the whole involuted, boggling thing one beautiful
straight line."] *
* Obviously, my option, for the time being at
least, favors John Shade's ( cf.
PF,lines 220/24) "... Why/ Scorn a hereafter none can
verify:/...the
talks/With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks..."
when the sweet drops of Lethe helped him stop
worrying about Sybil and Hazel and Maud and fountains and Pale Fire
and IPH and even his cruel best.