1. In his posting that bulged with multiple answers, CHW noted:
"in various messages, jansy@AETERN.US writes... "
Yes, CHW, aint I insistent?

2. CHW notes that "Shade and Kinbote are branches sprouting from VN."
Oh, yes, indeed! But that's what happens with every novel that sports different characters, ie, they are all creations of a single author, sometimes gaining independent voices ( as it is said about Dostoevsky) and, sometimes, not.
Are you, CHW,implying that VN's characters are all mirror images of VN, with no other clear voice?

( I must surmise, again, that you are playing with the metaphorical branches I was swinging on?)

3. Writes CHW on the quote: One life,—a little gleam of time between two Eternities. (Heroes and Hero-Worship. The Hero as a Man of Letters.)
CHW:"Merely the Anglo-Saxon sparrow, between the two dark ends of the mead-hall, re-phrased. Plagiarism."
I gather that the accusation of plagiarism applies to Carlyle, not to the other authors who used it. I was curious about VN's reading: would he have been familiar with Carlyle? Would he have perused John Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" (10th ed. 1919)? The reason I selected this sentence was because of the image of the cradle and abyss in VN's initial chapter in "Speak Memory". I believe that it is next to impossible to determine who arrived first at the same perception about "time before and time after", who felt this experience independently of any other reference by different authors.

A propos of Anglo-Saxon sparrows and non-Xtian imagery: Brian Boyd connects the opening sentences in SM to the first lines of "Pale Fire".Priscilla Meyer studies it in her own book on Pale Fire and mentions The Honorable Bede ( using that image of a sparrow crossing a lighted room while entering it from a dark winter night and returning to it again ). I found another interesting link with Pascal, following Marina Grishakova's quote about that French mathematician: "What will we do then, but perceive the appearance of the middle of things, in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end. All things proceed from the Nothing, and are borne towards the Infinite" (MG: Sign Systems Studies 28, Tartu University Press, 2000, pp. 242-263). Don B. Johnson observed that the "darkness/sliver of light/darkness" metaphor is not uncommon.He added that he'd recently run across it not only in Montaigne but in the recent Turkish novel by Orhan Pamuk "My Name is Red": "Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death,inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'de been living luminously between two eternities of darkness." Carolyn Kunin remembered Beckett in "Waiting for Godot"...

CHW: "Brevity is the soul of wit. Nevertheless Oscar Williams' jeu d'esprit might be clarified by inserting an extra stanza between I. and II. As follows:Thy eye I eyed. [Thanks Will --- sonnet 104. Incidentally, does the idea that "Will" was an Eizabethan euphemism for penis, as asserted by someone a few postings ago, have any solid foundation? I haven't checked Partridge, but it sheds new light on Schopenhauer.]

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.