NB: While returning to your article on "Errata and Aporia" in my last
posting, I made a slip. I meant to note that "John Ray's
preambulation walks ahead of itself, just like Humbert Humbert
comes before himself." (and my reformulation still
isn't precise because there are too many legs to stumble upon!)
Anthony Stadlen [on "Lolita's 56
days" conundrum observes that he was "struck by the fact that
those who write about it seem invariably to refer to a discrepancy of "three
days". Presumably this is a matter of one ]person's miscounting and the rest's
not bothering to count, but merely copying. For the discrepancy is, in fact,
four days, as I shall show." And his demonstration is very throrough,
delightful indeed! When he comments, from Appel's notes "Humbert's record
of the presumably fake registration numbers of his car left by Quilty -- Q 32888
and CU 88322 -- make a great deal of the fact that the two car numbers add up to
52." and elegantly connects it to other Appel-notes [251/14] in which
he says: "There are fifty-two cards in a deck, and the author of King,
Queen, Knave still has a few up his sleeve, as he demonstrates here."
and [251/15]: "...it is quite impossible that either H.H. or Quilty could
realize the full significance of the number fifty-two; only one person can, and
the 'common denominator' points to the author."] made me risk another possible
hint (I'm a hopeless case with figures and cards!): the
registration numbers of Quilty's car involve three ciphers
only (8,3,2). The doubling of the 8 in one, and of the 2 in the
other stands in the way of arriving at two pairs of numbers
growing in opposing directions: 3288(8) and 8832(2). We
must remember that Nabokov once confessed that he was "subject to the embarrassing qualms of
superstition: a number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me
obsessively." * and that his number superstition might in
fact have helped him to achieve the venerable age of "three score and
ten."...
.....................................................................................................................
* Interview with Alden Whitman, in mid-April,
1971, reproduced, with misprints and other flaws, in The New York
Times, April 23.
AW: You, sir, will be seventy-two in
a few days, having exceeded the Biblical three score and
ten. How does this feat, if it is a feat, impress you?
VN: "Three
score and ten" sounded, no doubt, very venerable in the days when life
expectancy hardly reached one half of that length.
Anyway, Petersburgan pediatricians never thought I might
perform the feat you mention: a feat of lucky endurance, of
paradoxically detached will power, of good work and
good
wine, of healthy concentration on a rare bug or
a rhythmic phrase. Another thing that might have been of some help
is the fact that I am subject to the
embarrassing qualms of superstition: a
number, a dream, a coincidence can affect me obsessively-- though not in
the sense of absurd fears but as fabulous (and on the
whole rather bracing) scientific enigmas incapable of being
stated, let alone solved.