Bob Fagen to J.M:  Blame Kinbote, or something, a roundlet perhaps, for editing Shade's assonant "feigned remoteness" to "feigned reflection". There they are again, aloof and mute, playing a game of words. And again. Worlds. Many worlds. Help me, Hugh [Everett].*

 

R.S.Gwynn: Nabokov noted that the strange behavior of waxwings vs. windows was something he observed from inside the house in Ithaca that the family was occupying at the time. Birds fly into my own study's windows from time to time, usually with less than fatal results. The "false azure" and "feigned remoteness" are imaginative leaps to the birds' point of view.

 




Jansy Mello:  It was necessary to search about Hugh Everett. Many worlds! Quantum physics! And yet, perhaps Kinbote sided more with Alan Sokal than with VN's dreams about multiverses - and your ressonant ones.

 

I tried to find "tintarron" in the dictionaries I have at hand but it seems the word has been coined by V.Nabokov to relate it with (false?) "azure" ( I just read that a new "tint" of blue has been discovered, it might correspond to VN's tintarron were the colors more translucent than the present blend reported at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/sujatakundu/2016/06/30/the-accidental-discovery-of-a-brand-new-shade-of-blue/#5b538e2d438e  and named YInMn Blue )

 

 

 

 

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*- Thank you for the reply [ Bob Fagen: slain waxwing's feigned reflection in windowpane?] It's always fun to retake familiar lines and find them strange again.  Indeed, why substitute a window's "... false azure" for the suggested "feigned remoteness"? Or why aresn't CK's commentaries to these lines included under "Windows" in his Index...Thanks to your prompting I remembered that the poem's opening lines start describing an adventure that has taken place in the outside, perhaps in a summery garden - but that the poet soon moves to "the inside" of a house where he'll again ("too") "duplicate" himself, thanks to the opacity engendered by a winter night! (later on, the wintery reflections of both landscapes, inside and outside, will be harmoniously blended). [   ] "we cannot help reading into these lines something more than mirrorplay and mirage shimmer. We feel doom, in the image of Gradus, eating away the miles and miles of "feigned remoteness" between him and poor Shade. He, too, is to meet, in his urgent and blind flight, a reflection that will shatter him." Is Gradus also being compared to the slain waxwing now shattered by a reflection?
Is it the Author's face, no longer to be searched "in a glass, darkly" (CK, fwd: "None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbable that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly
.")."

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