In VN's story Time and Ebb (1944) the narrator mentions the savage vulgarity of Hitler or Alamillo:
But in spite of all the ridiculous customs and complications in which it was entangled, the world of my young days was a gallant and tough little world that countered adversity with a bit of dry humor and would calmly set out for remote battlefields in order to suppress the savage vulgarity of Hitler or Alamillo. And if I let myself go, many would be the bright, and kind, and dreamy, and lovely things which impassioned memory would find in the past-- and then woe to the present age, for there is no knowing what a still vigorous old man might do to it if he tucked up his sleeves. But enough of this. History is not my field, so perhaps I had better turn to the personal lest I be told, as Mr. Saskatchewanov is told by the most charming character in present-day fiction (corroborated by my great-granddaughter, who reads more than I do), that "ev'ry cricket ought keep to its picket" -- and not intrude on the rightful domain of other "gads and summersmiths." (1)
Alamillo is a diminutive form of the Spanish word álamo, which means "poplar tree." In his poem Las doce en el reloj ("It's Twelve O'Clock on the Clock") Jorge Guillén (a Spanish poet, 1893-1984, who taught at Wellesley College from 1941 until his retirement in 1957) mentions un álamo:
Dije: Todo ya pleno.
Un álamo vibró.
Las hojas plateadas
Sonaron con amor.
Los verdes eran grises,
El amor era sol.
Entonces, mediodía,
Un pájaro sumió
Su cantar en el viento
Con tal adoración
Que se sintió cantada
Bajo el viento la flor
Crecida entre las mieses,
Más altas. Era yo,
Centro en aquel instante
De tanto alrededor,
Quien lo veía todo
Completo para un dios.
Dije: Todo, completo.
¡Las doce en el reloj!
A few Spanish words that Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) knows come from an en regard translation of two poems by Jorge Guillén:
A gong bronzily boomed on a terrace.
For some odd reason both children were relieved to learn that a stranger was expected to dinner. He was an Andalusian architect whom Uncle Dan wanted to plan an ‘artistic’ swimming pool for Ardis Manor. Uncle Dan had intended to come, too, with an interpreter, but had caught the Russian ‘hrip’ (Spanish flu) instead, and had phoned Marina asking her to be very nice to good old Alonso.
‘You must help me!’ Marina told the children with a worried frown.
‘I could show him a copy, perhaps,’ said Ada, turning to Van, ‘of an absolutely fantastically lovely nature morte by Juan de Labrador of Extremadura — golden grapes and a strange rose against a black background. Dan sold it to Demon, and Demon has promised to give it to me on my fifteenth birthday.’
‘We also have some Zurbarán fruit,’ said Van smugly. ‘Tangerines, I believe, and a fig of sorts, with a wasp upon it. Oh, we’ll dazzle the old boy with shop talk!’
They did not. Alonso, a tiny wizened man in a double-breasted tuxedo, spoke only Spanish, while the sum of Spanish words his hosts knew scarcely exceeded half a dozen. Van had canastilla (a little basket), and nubarrones (thunderclouds), which both came from an en regard translation of a lovely Spanish poem in one of his schoolbooks. Ada remembered, of course, mariposa, butterfly, and the names of two or three birds (listed in ornithological guides) such as paloma, pigeon, or grevol, hazel hen. Marina knew aroma and hombre, and an anatomical term with a ‘j’ hanging in the middle. In consequence, the table-talk consisted of long lumpy Spanish phrases pronounced very loud by the voluble architect who thought he was dealing with very deaf people, and of a smatter of French, intentionally but vainly italianized by his victims. Once the difficult dinner over, Alonso investigated by the light of three torches held by two footmen a possible site for an expensive pool, put the plan of the grounds back into his briefcase, and after kissing by mistake Ada’s hand in the dark, hastened away to catch the last southbound train. (1.6)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): lovely Spanish poem: really two poems — Jorge Guillén’s Descanso en jardin and his El otoño: isla).
Alamillo's Russian counterpart, topolyok (little poplar) occurs in VN's story Korolyok ("The Leonardo," 1933):
Собираются, стягиваются с разных мест вызываемые предметы, причем иным приходится преодолевать не только даль, но и давность: с кем больше хлопот, с тем кочевником или с этим - с молодым тополем, скажем, который рос поблизости, но теперь давно срублен, или с выбранным двором, существующим и по сей час, но находящимся далеко отсюда? Поторопитесь, пожалуйста.
Вот овальный тополек в своей апрельской пунктирной зелени уже пришел и стал, где ему приказано - у высокой кирпичной стены - целиком выписанной из другого города. Напротив вырастает дом, большой, мрачный и грязный, и один за другим выдвигаются, как ящики, плохонькие балконы. Там и сям распределяются по двору: бочка, еще бочка, легкая тень листвы, какая-то урна и каменный крест, прислоненный к стене. И хотя все это только намечено, и еще многое нужно дополнить и доделать, но на один из балкончиков уже выходят живые люди - братья Густав и Антон, - а во двор вступает, катя тележку с чемоданом и кипой книг, новый жилец - Романтовский.
The objects that are being summoned assemble, draw near from different spots; in doing so, some of them have to overcome not only the distance of space but that of time: which nomad, you may wonder, is more bothersome to cope with, this one or that, the young poplar, say, that once grew in the vicinity but was cut down long ago, or the singled-out courtyard which still exists today but is situated far away from here? Hurry up, please.
Here comes the ovate little poplar, all punctated with April greenery, and takes its stand where told, namely by the tall brick wall, imported in one piece from another city. Facing it, there grows up a dreary and dirty tenement house, with little balconies pulled out one by one like drawers. Other bits of scenery are distributed about the yard: a barrel, a second barrel, the delicate shade of leaves, an urn of sorts, and a stone cross propped at the foot of the wall. All this is only sketched and much has to be added and finished, and yet two live people -- Gustav and his brother Anton--already come out on their tiny balcony, while rolling before him a little pushcart with a suitcase and a heap of books, Romantovski, the new lodger, enters the yard.
The new lodger, Romantovski (whom the narrator believes to be a poet and who is brutally murdered by Gustav) turns out to be a counterfeiter. In Chekhov’s story V ovrage (“In the Ravine,” 1900) Anisim Tsybukin (Lipa’s husband) is arrested for counterfeiting coins. In his poem Slava (“Fame,” 1942) VN says that he “kept changing countries like counterfeit money” and mentions the flame-licked night of his native land:
или, может быть - было бы здорово,
если б этим шутник указывал мне,
что я страны менял, как фальшивые деньги,
торопясь и боясь оглянуться назад,
как раздваивающееся привиденье,
как свеча меж зеркал, уплывая в закат.
Далеко от лугов, где ребенком я плакал,
упустив аполлона, и дальше еще
до еловой аллеи с полосками мрака,
меж которыми полдень сквозил горячо.
Но воздушным мостом мое слово изогнуто
через мир, и чредой спицевидных теней
без конца по нему прохожу я инкогнито
в полыхающий сумрак отчизны моей.
I kept changing countries like counterfeit money,
hurrying on and afraid to look back,
like a phantom dividing in two, like a candle
between mirrors sailing into the sun.
It is far to the meadows where I sobbed in my childhood
having missed an Apollo, and farther yet
to the alley of firs where the midday sunlight
glowed with fissures of fire between bands of jet.
But my word, curved to form an aerial viaduct,
spans the world, and across in strobe-effect spin
of spokes I keep endlessly passing incognito
into the flame-licked night of my native land.
The author's mysterious visitor in VN's poem Fame seems to be the devil. In a letter of May 15, 1889, to Suvorin Chekhov says that anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have the same purpose and the same enemy—the devil:
Если Вы еще не уехали за границу, отвечаю на Ваше письмо о Бурже. Буду краток. Вы пишете между прочим: «Пускай наука о материи идет своим чередом, но пусть также остается что-нибудь такое, где можно укрыться от этой сплошной материи». Наука о материи идет своим чередом, и те места, где можно укрыться от сплошной материи, тоже существуют своим чередом, и, кажется, никто не посягает на них. Если кому и достается, то только естественным наукам, но не святым местам, куда прячутся от этих наук. В моём письме вопрос поставлен правильнее и безобиднее, чем в Вашем, и я ближе к «жизни духа», чем Вы. Вы говорите о праве тех или других знаний на существование, я же говорю не о праве, а о мире. Я хочу, чтобы люди не видели войны там, где ее нет. Знания всегда пребывали в мире. И анатомия, и изящная словесность имеют одинаково знатное происхождение, одни и те же цели, одного и того же врага — чёрта, и воевать им положительно не из-за чего. Борьбы за существование у них нет. Если человек знает учение о кровообращении, то он богат; если к тому же выучивает еще историю религии и романс "Я помню чудное мгновенье", то становится не беднее, а богаче, — стало быть, мы имеем дело только с плюсами. Потому-то гении никогда не воевали, и в Гёте рядом с поэтом прекрасно уживался естественник.
Воюют же не знания, не поэзия с анатомией, а заблуждения, т. е. люди. Когда человек не понимает, то чувствует в себе разлад; причин этого разлада он ищет не в себе самом, как бы нужно было, а вне себя, отсюда и война с тем, чего он не понимает. Во все средние века алхимия постепенно, естественным мирным порядком культивировалась в химию, астрология — в астрономию; монахи не понимали, видели войну и воевали сами. Таким же воюющим испанским монахом был в шестиде<сятых> годах наш Писарев.
Воюет и Бурже. Вы говорите, что он не воюет, а я говорю, что воюет. Представьте, что его роман попадает в руки человека, имеющего детей на естественном факультете, или в руки архиерея, ищущего сюжета для воскресной проповеди. Будет ли что-нибудь похожее на мир в полученном эффекте? Нет. Представьте, что роман попал на глаза анатому или физиологу и т. д. Ни в чью душу не повеет от него миром, знающих он раздражит, а не знающих наградит ложными представлениями — и только.
If you have not gone abroad yet, I will answer your letter about Bourget.... You are speaking of the “right to live” of this or that branch of knowledge; I am speaking of peace, not of rights. I want people not to see war where there is none. Different branches of knowledge have always lived together in peace. Anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have the same purpose and the same enemy—the devil—and there is absolutely nothing for them to fight about. There is no struggle for existence between them. If a man knows about the circulation of the blood, he is rich; if he also learns the history of religion and the song “I remember a marvellous moment,” he becomes richer, not poorer—that is to say, we are concerned with pluses alone. This is why geniuses have never fought, and in Goethe the poet lived amicably side by side with the scientist.
It is not branches of knowledge such as poetry and anatomy, but errors—that is to say, men—that fight with one another. When a man fails to understand something he is conscious of a discord, and seeks for the cause of it not in himself, as he should, but outside himself—hence the war with what he does not understand. In the middle ages alchemy was gradually in a natural, peaceful way changing into chemistry, and astrology into astronomy; the monks did not understand, saw a conflict and fought against it. Just such a belligerent Spanish monk was our Pisarev in the sixties.
Bourget, too, is fighting. You say he is not, and I say he is. Imagine his novel falling into the hands of a man whose children are studying in the faculty of science, or of a bishop who is looking for a subject for his Sunday sermon. Will the effect be anything like peace? It will not. Or imagine the novel catching the eye of an anatomist or a physiologist, or any such. It will not breathe peace into anyone’s soul; it will irritate those who know and give false ideas to those who don’t.
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a doctor. The narrator in Time and Ebb must be a zoologist:
In the first floriferous days of convalescence after a severe illness, which nobody, least of all the patient himself, expected a ninety-year-old organism to survive, I was admonished by my dear friends Norman and Nura Stone to prolong the lull in my scientific studies and relax in the midst of some innocent occupation such as brazzle or solitaire.
The first is out of the question, since tracking the name of an Asiatic town or the title of a Spanish novel through a maze of jumbled syllables on the last page of the evening newsbook (a feat which my youngest great-granddaughter performs with the utmost zest) strikes me as far more strenuous than toying with animal tissues. Solitaire, on the other hand, is worthy of consideration, especially if one is sensitive to its mental counterpart; for is not the setting down of one's reminiscences a game of the same order, wherein events and emotions are dealt to oneself in leisurely retrospection? (1)
Describing a lunch at Ardis, Van mentions Paul Bourget’s ‘monologue intérieur’ borrowed from old Leo:
Weekday lunch at Ardis Hall. Lucette between Marina and the governess; Van between Marina and Ada; Dack, the golden-brown stoat, under the table, either between Ada and Mlle Larivière, or between Lucette and Marina (Van secretly disliked dogs, especially at meals, and especially that smallish longish freak with a gamey breath). Arch and grandiloquent, Ada would be describing a dream, a natural history wonder, a special belletristic device — Paul Bourget’s ‘monologue intérieur’ borrowed from old Leo — or some ludicrous blunder in the current column of Elsie de Nord, a vulgar literary demimondaine who thought that Lyovin went about Moscow in a nagol’nïy tulup, ‘a muzhik’s sheepskin coat, bare side out, bloom side in,’ as defined in a dictionary our commentator produced like a conjurer, never to be procurable by Elsies. Her spectacular handling of subordinate clauses, her parenthetic asides, her sensual stressing of adjacent monosyllables (‘Idiot Elsie simply can’t read’) — all this somehow finished by acting upon Van, as artificial excitements and exotic torture-caresses might have done, in an aphrodisiac sinistral direction that he both resented and perversely enjoyed. (1.10)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): monologue intérieur: the so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’ device, used by Leo Tolstoy (in describing, for instance, Anna’s last impressions whilst her carriage rolls through the streets of Moscow).
A namesake of Elsie Rack (the wife of Philip Rack, the music teacher of Van's and Ada's half-sister Lucette), Elsie de Nord brings to mind the First Clown in Elsinore, a distinguished London weekly, the author of a review of Van's novel Letters from Terra. The action in Ada takes place on Demonia, Earth's twin planet also known as Antiterra. Describing the political situation on Terra, Van mentions Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform:
Western Europe presented a particularly glaring gap: ever since the eighteenth century, when a virtually bloodless revolution had dethroned the Capetians and repelled all invaders, Terra’s France flourished under a couple of emperors and a series of bourgeois presidents, of whom the present one, Doumercy, seemed considerably more lovable than Milord Goal, Governor of Lute! Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. Last but not least, Athaulf the Future, a fair-haired giant in a natty uniform, the secret flame of many a British nobleman, honorary captain of the French police, and benevolent ally of Rus and Rome, was said to be in the act of transforming a gingerbread Germany into a great country of speedways, immaculate soldiers, brass bands and modernized barracks for misfits and their young. (2.2)
In Victor Vitry's film version of Van's novel Letters from Terra Athaulf the Future becomes Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate):
In 1905, Norway with a mighty heave and a long dorsal ripple unfastened herself from Sweden, her unwieldy co-giantess, while in a similar act of separation the French parliament, with parenthetical outbursts of vive émotion, voted a divorce between State and Church. Then, in 1911, Norwegian troops led by Amundsen reached the South Pole and simultaneously the Italians stormed into Turkey. In 1914 Germany invaded Belgium and the Americans tore up Panama. In 1918 they and the French defeated Germany while she was busily defeating Russia (who had defeated her own Tartars some time earlier). In Norway there was Siegrid Mitchel, in America Margaret Undset, and in France, Sidonie Colette. In 1926 Abdel-Krim surrendered, after yet another photogenic war, and the Golden Horde again subjugated Rus. In 1933, Athaulf Hindler (also known as Mittler — from ‘to mittle,’ mutilate) came to power in Germany, and a conflict on an even more spectacular scale than the 1914-1918 war was under way, when Vitry ran out of old documentaries and Theresa, played by his wife, left Terra in a cosmic capsule after having covered the Olympic Games held in Berlin (the Norwegians took most of the prizes, but the Americans won the fencing event, an outstanding achievement, and beat the Germans in the final football match by three goals to one). (5.5)
In VN's story Conversation Piece, 1945 the narrator says that he often wondered why is it that a thin German always manages to look so plump behind (cf. Hindler) when wearing a raincoat. Dr. Shoe (a character in VN's story, the German who looks so plump behind) brings to mind old Paar of Chose (a play on "old pair of shoes") and Zapater of Aardvark, the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers whom Van mentions when he describes the difference between Terra and Antiterra:
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of ‘Terra,’ are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen.
Of course, today, after great anti-L years of reactionary delusion have gone by (more or less!) and our sleek little machines, Faragod bless them, hum again after a fashion, as they did in the first half of the nineteenth century, the mere geographic aspect of the affair possesses its redeeming comic side, like those patterns of brass marquetry, and bric-à-Braques, and the ormolu horrors that meant ‘art’ to our humorless forefathers. For, indeed, none can deny the presence of something highly ludicrous in the very configurations that were solemnly purported to represent a varicolored map of Terra. Ved’ (‘it is, isn’t it’) sidesplitting to imagine that ‘Russia,’ instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today’s Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! But (even more absurdly), if, in Terrestrial spatial terms, the Amerussia of Abraham Milton was split into its components, with tangible water and ice separating the political, rather than poetical, notions of ‘America’ and ‘Russia,’ a more complicated and even more preposterous discrepancy arose in regard to time — not only because the history of each part of the amalgam did not quite match the history of each counterpart in its discrete condition, but because a gap of up to a hundred years one way or another existed between the two earths; a gap marked by a bizarre confusion of directional signs at the crossroads of passing time with not all the no-longers of one world corresponding to the not-yets of the other. It was owing, among other things, to this ‘scientifically ungraspable’ concourse of divergences that minds bien rangés (not apt to unhobble hobgoblins) rejected Terra as a fad or a fantom, and deranged minds (ready to plunge into any abyss) accepted it in support and token of their own irrationality.
As Van Veen himself was to find out, at the time of his passionate research in terrology (then a branch of psychiatry) even the deepest thinkers, the purest philosophers, Paar of Chose and Zapater of Aardvark, were emotionally divided in their attitude toward the possibility that there existed’ a distortive glass of our distorted glebe’ as a scholar who desires to remain unnamed has put it with such euphonic wit. (Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada’s hand.) (1.3)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): beau milieu: right in the middle.
Faragod: apparently, the god of electricity.
braques: allusion to a bric-à-brac painter.
Beau milieu brings to mind Alamillo. There is L in Hitler, Hindler and Mittler (the German word for 'middle' is Mitte; Mittel means 'means'). After the L disaster electricity was banned on Demonia. In Time and Ebb the narrator says that the chance revelation of electricity's true nature came as a most hideous surprise:
Elementary allobiotic phenomena led their so-called spiritualists to the silliest forms of transcendental surmise and made so-called common sense shrug its broad shoulders in equally silly ignorance. Our denominations of time would have seemed to them "telephone" numbers. They played with electricity in various ways without having the slightest notion of what it really was -- and no wonder the chance revelation of its true nature came as a most hideous surprise (I was a man by that time and can well remember old Professor Andrews sobbing his heart out on the campus in the midst of a dumbfounded crowd). (1)
Btw., Alamillo may also hint at Los Alamos ("The Poplars") and Alamogordo ("Thick Poplar"), the places in New Mexico connected with designing of nuclear weapon. In his lecture on dreams Van brings up the meaningless ‘nuclear’ instead of ‘unclear’ as an example of typos:
What are dreams? A random sequence of scenes, trivial or tragic, viatic or static, fantastic or familiar, featuring more or less plausible events patched up with grotesque details, and recasting dead people in new settings.
In reviewing the more or less memorable dreams I have had during the last nine decades I can classify them by subject matter into several categories among which two surpass the others in generic distinctiveness. There are the professional dreams and there are the erotic ones. In my twenties the first kind occurred about as frequently as the second, and both had their introductory counterparts, insomnias conditioned either by the overflow of ten hours of vocational work or by the memory of Ardis that a thorn in my day had maddeningly revived. After work I battled against the might of the mind-set: the stream of composition, the force of the phrase demanding to be formed could not be stopped for hours of darkness and discomfort, and when some result had been achieved, the current still hummed on and on behind the wall, even if I locked up my brain by an act of self-hypnosis (plain will, or pill, could no longer help) within some other image or meditation — but not Ardis, not Ada, for that would mean drowning in a cataract of worse wakefulness, with rage and regret, desire and despair sweeping me into an abyss where sheer physical extenuation stunned me at last with sleep.
In the professional dreams that especially obsessed me when I worked on my earliest fiction, and pleaded abjectly with a very frail muse (‘kneeling and wringing my hands’ like the dusty-trousered Marmlad before his Marmlady in Dickens), I might see for example that I was correcting galley proofs but that somehow (the great ‘somehow’ of dreams!) the book had already come out, had come out literally, being proffered to me by a human hand from the wastepaper basket in its perfect, and dreadfully imperfect, stage — with a typo on every page, such as the snide ‘bitterly’ instead of ‘butterfly’ and the meaningless ‘nuclear’ instead of ‘unclear.’ Or I would be hurrying to a reading I had to give — would feel exasperated by the sight of the traffic and people blocking my way, and then realize with sudden relief that all I had to do was to strike out the phrase ‘crowded street’ in my manuscript. What I might designate as ‘skyscape’ (not ‘skyscrape,’ as two-thirds of the class will probably take it down) dreams belongs to a subdivision of my vocational visions, or perhaps may represent a preface to them, for it was in my early pubescence that hardly a night would pass without some old or recent waketime impression’s establishing a soft deep link with my still-muted genius (for we are ‘van,’ rhyming with and indeed signifying ‘one’ in Marina’s double-you-less deep-voweled Russian pronunciation). The presence, or promise, of art in that kind of dream would come in the image of an overcast sky with a manifold lining of cloud, a motionless but hopeful white, a hopeless but gliding gray, showing artistic signs of clearing, and presently the glow of a pale sun grew through the leaner layer only to be recowled by the scud, for I was not yet ready. (2.4)
Describing Victor Vitry's film, Van mentions agents from distant Atomsk:
L.F.T. tiny dolls, L.F.T. breloques of coral and ivory, appeared in souvenir shops, from Agony, Patagonia, to Wrinkleballs, Le Bras d’Or. L.F.T. clubs sprouted. L.F.T. girlies minced with mini-menus out of roadside snackettes shaped like spaceships. From the tremendous correspondence that piled up on Van’s desk during a few years of world fame, one gathered that thousands of more or less unbalanced people believed (so striking was the visual impact of the Vitry-Veen film) in the secret Government-concealed identity of Terra and Antiterra. Demonian reality dwindled to a casual illusion. Actually, we had passed through all that. Politicians, dubbed Old Felt and Uncle Joe in forgotten comics, had really existed. Tropical countries meant, not only Wild Nature Reserves but famine, and death, and ignorance, and shamans, and agents from distant Atomsk. Our world was, in fact, mid-twentieth-century. Terra convalesced after enduring the rack and the stake, the bullies and beasts that Germany inevitably generates when fulfilling her dreams of glory. Russian peasants and poets had not been transported to Estotiland, and the Barren Grounds, ages ago — they were dying, at this very moment, in the slave camps of Tartary. Even the governor of France was not Charlie Chose, the suave nephew of Lord Goal, but a bad-tempered French general. (5.5)
Wrinkleballs brings to mind an anatomical term with a ‘j’ hanging in the middle (cojones, one of the three Spanish words that Marina knew). The rack and the stake make one think of Philip Rack, Lucette's music teacher and composer of genius who was poisoned by his jealous wife and who dies in Ward Five (where hopeless cases are kept) of the Kalugano hospital. Kalugano (Kaluga + Lugano) reminds one of those little European towns one half of which is in France and the other in Russia mentioned by the narrator in Time and Ebb:
I suppose I am old-fashioned in my attitude toward many aspects of life that happen to be outside my particular branch of science; and possibly the personality of the very old man I am may seem divided, like those little European towns one half of which is in France and the other in Russia. I know this and proceed warily. Far from me is the intention to promote any yearning and morbid regret in regard to flying machines, but at the same time I cannot suppress the romantic undertone which is inherent to the symphonic entirety of the past as I feel it. (3)