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Fw: Fw: Pnin as featherless biped?
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Wayne Daniels" <wdaniels@tpl.toronto.on.ca>
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (10
lines) ------------------
> >If VN knew this story, which has a pretty broad
> currency even outside the small circle of fans of Diogenes L., I suspect
its appeal for him would have been the idea that it's impossible to devise a
reductive "scientific" definition of something as wondrous as man, as
complex as, for example, Pnin.
>
> It might have appealed even more to his taste for the apocryphal, and for
literary mischief in general. And perhaps most of all to his sense of irony.
If I remember, Nietzsche refers to Laertius as a "caretaker" or
"night-watchman" of philosophy ― or some such formula ― as a way of
expressing his contempt and dismay at the fact that so many philosophers
should survive only as recorded by such a mediocrity as DL. He owes his
continuing readership entirely to this mischance.
>
> What does Nabokov say about Cockerell, at work on his encoded diaries and
convinced they will some day be regarded as a literary treasure? Something
like: "For all I know you may be right."
>
> Cheers,
> Wayne Daniels
>
From: "Wayne Daniels" <wdaniels@tpl.toronto.on.ca>
>
> ----------------- Message requiring your approval (10
lines) ------------------
> >If VN knew this story, which has a pretty broad
> currency even outside the small circle of fans of Diogenes L., I suspect
its appeal for him would have been the idea that it's impossible to devise a
reductive "scientific" definition of something as wondrous as man, as
complex as, for example, Pnin.
>
> It might have appealed even more to his taste for the apocryphal, and for
literary mischief in general. And perhaps most of all to his sense of irony.
If I remember, Nietzsche refers to Laertius as a "caretaker" or
"night-watchman" of philosophy ― or some such formula ― as a way of
expressing his contempt and dismay at the fact that so many philosophers
should survive only as recorded by such a mediocrity as DL. He owes his
continuing readership entirely to this mischance.
>
> What does Nabokov say about Cockerell, at work on his encoded diaries and
convinced they will some day be regarded as a literary treasure? Something
like: "For all I know you may be right."
>
> Cheers,
> Wayne Daniels
>