----- Original Message -----
From: jansymello
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum
Sent: Thursday, August 06, 2009 2:17 PM
Subject: [NABOKOV-L] TOOL and the Advance PW Review,PS

Ridiculous spelling mistakes are more annoying than most, such as "onlime," in my latest message! Besides, there was one missing item to the list about "definite,definition, definitive,"(and infinity) which leads us from "finis" and "terminus" towards the doctrine of "determinism," and the kind of established causal chain never espoused by lepidopterologist and fictionist* VN. Here it is:
 
determinate: c.1374, "to come to an end," also "to settle, decide," from O.Fr. determiner (12c.), from L. determinare "set limits to," from de- "off" + terminare "to mark the end or boundary," from terminus "end, limit." Sense of "coming to a firm decision" (to do something) is from 1450. Determination "quality of being resolute" is from 1822.
determinism is 1846 in theology (lack of free will); 1876 in general sense of "the doctrine that everything that happens is determined by a necessary chain of causation."
 
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* The first example I chose derives from a kind of "rethorical synaesthesia" (?), in RLSK:   "not the painting of a landscape, but the painting of different ways of painting a certain landscape...their harmonious fusion will disclose the landscape". The thunder is not "caused" by the lightning that is associated with it, but only one of the multiple representations of a distinct "landscape" ? The second example, also from RLSK's Success, has SK investigating "the methods of human fate," using fictional "scientific precision in the classification, examination, and rejection of an immense amount of data," to determine the exact way in which two lines of life converge and touch in "a glorious gamble on causalities or, if you prefer, the probing of the aetiological secret of aleatory occurrences." His reader and commentator, V, is "forced to assume that the outward circumstances of meeting are not samples of fate's activity in regard to two, subjects but a given entity, a fixed point, of no causal import."
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