r Matt,
I was anxious to correct a mistake about the waning moon, mispelled as vane by an extension from vanish and evanescent. Funny to imagine that for the image of Pale Fire, as a title, to operate with all its lights, we need to imagine a permanent full moon. Actually when the moon is a crescent people sometimes represent it as if it missed its round shape altogether. Doesnt it fit into your image of a synthesis of sun and star, the idea that the moon is always whole but sometimes obscured by shades? Seen on the wane as if one part of it had disappeared?
My Vanessa connection to evanescence is related to certain uses of the word phaneros, perhaps through the French phaneres. It indicates a sudden manifestation, a lightining illumination, as in an epiphany. This is why nails and hair are somehow connected because they are transient corporeal manifestations.
My accidental find related to Orpheus and evanescence, leading us to Mallarme, gave me a hint about searching in this poet for his Orpheus to see if Nabokov had also hinted at him. He was familiar with French poets...