EDNote:  Since R. Rosenbaum's challenge here is to B. Boyd, I am not going to post any responses to this gauntlet until B.Boyd has had a chance to make his own reply, at which point I'll open the forum for others' observations… I point to them here as reminders to all to keep discourse respectful and free of ad hominem comments.  It's a tricky boundary, and these clearly straddle it, or at least tickle it. Let's please stick to the facts. ~SB

 

JM:  I love tricky boundaries,ticklish issues and sticking to facts (when ‘facts’ only mean our present access to something demonstrably shared). Answering your note, not RR’s posting, is reasonably acceptable, I think.

 

The lines I’d just quoted, in relation to a non- metafictional pizza, and stated by Lavoisier, were in the wrong order, or so it seems. I found his maxim being mentioned as “In nature nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed,” when I also learned that, in its turn, it has been borrowed from the ancient Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras. Lavoisier and Marat are connected (in a mutually lethal embrace), therefore this remark belongs to the Nabokovian realm, too. Writer and poet Machado de Assis once wrote a succession of lamentations which might have equally been inspired by Shakespeare’s lines, as quoted by Kinbote ( or V.Botkin). Machado, though, looked at the versipel, from a different perspective. He named his sonnet “Vicious Circle”. In it we learn about how a humble fire-fly envies the moon for its light, while the moon envies the sun’s and the sun envies the firefly’s free casual light.

 

If the lines about “ex ponto”, attributing the index to Shade, were ever thought up by Nabokov for an inclusion in his foreword to “Speak,Memory,” thereby betraying Botkin’s invention only to spite Mary McCarthy, then…more than having “thievery” for a theme, we’d find ourselves confronting Machado’s vicious circle of  “envy” (that thing about our neighbour’s grass being greener than ours…) and the green eyes of competition. Fortunately Nabokov abandoned his intent and Pale Fire’s equivocations continue to turn from sun to moon and fireflies endlessly and joyfully.