At the beginning of Canto Four of his poem John Shade (the poet in VN’s novel Pale Fire, 1962) says:
Now I shall spy on beauty as none has
Spied on it yet. Now I shall cry out as
None has cried out. Now I shall try what none
Has tried. Now I shall do what none has done. (ll. 835-838)
In J. L. Borges's story El Aleph (The Aleph, 1945) the narrator mentions a satire by his friend Carlos Argentino Daneri (a mediocre poet) that ends in the line "But they forget, alas, one foremost fact — BEAUTY!":
[Among my memories are also some lines of a satire in which he lashed out unsparingly at bad poets. After accusing them of dressing their poems in the warlike armour of erudition, and of flapping in vain their unavailing wings, he concluded with this verse:
But they forget, alas, one foremost fact — BEAUTY!
Only the fear of creating an army of implacable and powerful enemies dissuaded him (he told me) from fearlessly publishing this poem.]
In his note to Lines 835-838 (Now I shall spy, etc.) of Shade's poem Kinbote (Shade’s mad commentator who imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) compares the poet to a fiery rooster who seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-be inspiration:
The canto, begun on July 19th, on card sixty-eight, opens with a typical Shadism: the cunning working-in of several inter-echoing phrases into a jumble of enjambments. Actually, the promise made in these four lines will not be really kept except for the repetition of their incantatory rhythm in lines 915 and 923-924 (leading to the savage attack in 925-930). The poet like a fiery rooster seems to flap his wings in a preparatory burst of would-be inspiration, but the sun does not rise. Instead of the wild poetry promised here, we get a jest or two, a bit of satire, and at the end of the canto, a wonderful radiance of tenderness and repose.
At the end of J. L. Borges's story the narrator sees the Aleph (a point in space that contains all other points; anyone who gazes into it can see everything in the universe from every angle simultaneously, without distortion, overlapping, or confusion) in the cellar of Carlos Argentino Daneri's house:
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand...
Borges's story The Aleph makes one think of VN's eerie story Poseshchenie muzeya ("The Visit to the Museum," 1938). On the other hand, it brings to mind the basement of Shade's house visited by Kinbote:
Line 143: a clockwork toy
By a stroke of luck I have seen it! One evening in May or June I dropped in to remind my friend about a collection of pamphlets, by his grandfather, an eccentric clergyman, that he had once said was stored in the basement. I found him gloomily waiting for some people (members of his department, I believe, and their wives) who were coming for a formal dinner. He willingly took me down into the basement but after rummaging among piles of dusty books and magazines, said he would try to find them some other time. It was then that I saw it on a shelf, between a candlestick and a handless alarm clock. He, thinking I might think it had belonged to his dead daughter, hastily explained it was as old as he. The boy was a little Negro of painted tin with a keyhole in his side and no breadth to speak of, just consisting of two more or less fused profiles, and his wheelbarrow was now all bent and broken. He said, brushing the dust off his sleeves, that he kept it as a kind of memento mori--he had had a strange fainting fit one day in his childhood while playing with that toy. We were interrupted by Sybil's voice calling from above; but never mind, now the rusty clockwork shall work again, for I have the key.
The first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, aleph reminds one of Alphina (the youngest of Judge Goldsworth's four daughters) and King Alfin (Alfin the Vague), the father of Charles the Beloved. In Borges's story, the Aleph helps Carlos Argentino Daneri to write his poem La Tierra ("The Earth"). In Canto Three of his poem Shade speaks of IPH (a lay Institute of Preparation for the Hereafter) and mentions “Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp:”
While snubbing gods, including the big G,
Iph borrowed some peripheral debris
From mystic visions; and it offered tips
(The amber spectacles for life's eclipse) -
How not to panic when you're made a ghost:
Sidle and slide, choose a smooth surd, and coast,
Meet solid bodies and glissade right through,
Or let a person circulate through you.
How to locate in blackness, with a gasp,
Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp.
How to keep sane in spiral types of space.
Precautions to be taken in the case
Of freak reincarnation: what to do
On suddenly discovering that you
Are now a young and vulnerable toad
Plump in the middle of a busy road,
Or a bear cub beneath a burning pine,
Or a book mite in a revived divine. (ll. 549-566)
According to Kinbote, “How to locate in blackness, with a gasp, / Terra the Fair, an orbicle of jasp” is the loveliest couplet in the Canto. An orbicle of jasp brings to mind J. L. Borges's story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (1940). Tlön is a fictitious planet, created by a 15th century secret society named Orbis Tertius, in the literature of Uqbar (a fictional land).