The flattened couple in the book lying like dried plants  is a striking image about the book Van is writing in ADA,  but it creates a self-referential model and closed circularity that is in opposition to VN´s ideal of an open  "spiral". 
 
There have been indirect pointers to the Liar´s paradox  which I can summarize in a statement such as: " This shall be my last lie".
Those paradoxes arise from the self-referential closed circularity  which initially made me start on  "the I of the book that cannot die".
 
But I think that the image VN worked over in ADA -  and in which we find an insect resembling a flower that looks like a bug -   which comes closer to VN´s flattened couple can be heard in a poem by W.B.Yeats ( I selected the part ):
 
For every nerve: lover tests lover
With cruelties of Choice and Chance;
And when at last the murder's over
Maybe the bride-bed brings despair,
For each an imagined image brings
And finds a real image there;
Yet the world ends when these two things,
Though several, are a single light,
When oil and wick are burned in one;
( W.B. Yeats, Salomon and the Witch)
 
NB: My constant references to leaves in relation to an  "infolio" arose from the link between "infolio" and, for example,  "foliage" and, of course, book leaves ( in French "feuilles" or, in Portuguese, "folhas" ). Also to loss ( "leavings" and, in another key, "fallen leaves")  
Jansy
----- Original Message -----
From: Donald B. Johnson
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 1:44 PM
Subject: Fwd: The Eye/I



----- Forwarded message from jansy@aetern.us -----
    Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 12:08:20 -0000
    From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello <jansy@aetern.us>


Dear Don and List,

After Lolita´s impossible immortalization through Humbert´s tale of her life ,
while discussing certain passages in ADA we arrived at a curious infolium,  a
Gingko/Adafolium and the herbarium where there is a couple flattened inside the
pages of a book. This closes the circle in the narrative ( it begins and ends
with the leaves/pages of that infolio...) and leaves the spiraling leaves
somwhere else.

Today I came acros Boyd´s quotation in "Nabokov´s ADa", Beyond Consciousness
chapter, page 89:
" The I of the book/ Cannot die in the book"  and referred to LATH 239 )

We return to the mystery of all the various " I " of VN´s books and his
unreliable narrators.   But the point I want to raise today is the contrast
between this "I" that cannot die in the book and another "Eye" ( a novel that
seems to be  almost absent in our list: The Story of the EYE  )  that speaks
from the other side of the tomb ( like the title of one of Chateaubriand´s
works, never mentioned explicitly by VN: Mèmoires d´Autre Tombe or TT´s writing
ghosts ).

Like an "arrow shooting from one darkness into another" , what can Mr. R or Van
or HH say about this scrap of light or light breeze escaping from "Another
Scene" of the after-death?
Jansy

----- End forwarded message -----

Dear Don and List,
 
After Lolita´s impossible immortalization through Humbert´s tale of her life , while discussing certain passages in ADA we arrived at a curious infolium,  a Gingko/Adafolium and the herbarium where there is a couple flattened inside the pages of a book. This closes the circle in the narrative ( it begins and ends with the leaves/pages of that infolio...) and leaves the spiraling leaves somwhere else.
 
Today I came acros Boyd´s quotation in "Nabokov´s ADa", Beyond Consciousness chapter, page 89:
" The I of the book/ Cannot die in the book"  and referred to LATH 239 )
 
We return to the mistery of all the various " I " of VN´s books and his unreliable narrators.   But the point I want to raise today is the contrast between this "I" that cannot die in the book and another "Eye" ( a novel that seems to be  almost absent in our list: The Story of the EYE  )  that speaks from the other side of the tomb ( like the title of one of Chateaubriand´s works, never mentioned explicitly by VN: Mèmoires d´Autre Tombe or TT´s writing ghosts ).
 
Like an "arrow shooting from one darkness into another" , what can Mr. R or Van or HH say about this scrap of light or light breeze escaping from "Another Scene" of the after-death?   
Jansy