Butterflies

I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.

Charles Dickens


There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

R. Buckminster Fuller


Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Nathaniel Hawthorne


My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting.

Vladimir Nabokov

Happy Birthday, Nabokov

April 23 was Vladimir Nabokov's birthday. In an earlier post, I mentioned the Monkey Ship at the Mesker Park Zoo in Evansville, Indiana. In Nabokov's novel Lolita, the pedophilic protagonist Humbert Humbert and Lolita visited the zoo and saw the Monkey Ship, which in the old days housed a colony of rhesus monkeys. Ironically, in recent years, the moat around the ship has been converted into a bumper boat ride for children.

In other late-breaking news, Nabokov's son Dmitri recently announced he will not honor his father's request to burn his unfinished novel Original of Laura. The novel, which exists on 50 index cards in a Swiss bank vault, will be published.

Lolita and the Monkey Ship

Somehow I reached the age of 53 without reading the infamous novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is pronounced "Nab o' kov" with a long "o" in the accented second syllable, unlike Sting's pronunciation in the song "Don't Stand So Close to Me." Regarding pronunciation, I read a statement by Nabokov that Lolita should be pronounced with a short "o" like in "doll," even though the nickname is derived from the unfortunate girl's given name of Delores, and in places through the book is shortened to "Lo." In any case, I am in the midst of reading an annotated version of Lolita. Nabokov's style is complex, heavy with allusions, and I thought I would need all the help I could get to wade through it.

I was struck by one reference in Chapter Two of Part Two, where the main character, pedophile Humbert Humbert is describing sights he and Lolita had seen as they traveled across the country, including "(a) zoo in Indiana where a large troop of monkeys lived on concrete replica of Christopher Columbus' flagship." Sure enough, there is such a structure in the Mesker Park Zoo in Evansville, where Mary and I were married and lived for several years. It was a popular attraction beginning with its completion in the 1930's, but in more recent and enlightened times, it was determined that the 1/3 scale replica of the Santa Maria was unacceptable for simean habitation. The boat remains in the park sans monkeys to this day.