Some interesting comments on 1888 were made by Jasper Fidget a few years back:
> The last door is at the other end of the 1,888 yard tunnel, and leads to
the
> theater dressing room, the green door entrance into art and eternity, the
> synthesis. The dressing room once belonged to Iris Acht (8, infinity
> upright). The number of yards from the closet to the green door is a
> concrete poem for a threshold or an origin followed by a series of
> infinities: 1888: signifying death. Iris Acht dies in 1888, as did Mathew
> Arnold (as noted on p. 294, "still clutching the inviolable shade," a
quote
> from "The Scholar Gypsy," which suggests the immortality of art), as did
> Nikolai Przhevalski, a Russian naturalist and explorer for whom a city in
> eastern Kyrgyzstan is named (mentioned in VN's novel _The Gift_ I
believe).
> My (old) notes also indicate that in 1888 V.P. Botkin's essay on the
British
> theater appeared in the third volume of his work on Shakespeare, but I've
> been unable to verify this.
>
> http://www.win.tue.nl/~engels/discovery/prz.html
>
> Jasper Fidget
> I think VN had a lot of fun with the numbers of the poem, since he could
> count on them being the same in any edition (unlike page numbers). Many
> numbers in the Commentary are linked to line numbers in more ways than as
> cross-references.
>
> From hacking with the numbers in Note to Line 130 (with which I'll be
> flooding the list when we get there), I find something possibly
interesting
> on ln 131 (the reprise "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain"). In K's
> Commentary, the numbers 1888 and 1881 become visually important: 1888 as
an
> infinite serious beyond a fixed point (wall infinity infinity infinity),
> i.e. the future; and 1881 as infinity between two fixed barriers (wall
> infinity infinity wall), i.e. life.