On the train back from Princeton tonight, I heard an old acquaintance, Nick Stang, regaling a group of young and attentive mixed graduate students with anecdotes drawn out of Mark Johnston's upcoming Hempel lectures about surviving death (not really in any way we would consider survival). I thought about (re)introducing myself, but then thought better of it, because Nick seemed to be enjoying the slightly older role of raconteur, and the nostalgia from reliving an old Signet moment as an observer from four rows back seemed better than the possibly odd intrusion of my work addled self into their carousal. Was that politesse, or some sort of nervousness about not having a good rejoinder for Stang's 'transporter' summation of Johnston? At any rate, this is too much and too close to the blog as reminder of the non-heroic (shades of "Examination of the Hero in a Time of War," rejecting even the minor sally because of the poet's self-recognition as non-hero: squatter, shorter, somewhat recondite), so let us turn instead to the uplift of V.v.N, in Ada.

In this passage ([ed.] Shouldn't this glossalalia, digital marginalia, end, and scriber speak for himself? Perhaps.) Nabokov illuminates the strange tendrils that connect the reader with his anticipated book unread and the author with her anticipated book unwritten, both futureless, expectant: how ideal readers are young readers, first readers, love readers, blind readers, readers wondering how their own story will turn out: "One is irresistibly tempted to compare the strange longings and nauseous qualms that enter into the complicated ecstasies accompanying the making of a young writer's first book with childbearing. Van had only reached the bridal stage; then, to develop the metaphor, would come the sleeping car of messy defloration; then the first balcony of honeymoon breakfasts, with the first wasp." And so on a different train, not quite mothlike on the balustrade, but chrysalite, drowsy with filched honey from the dining car, pregnant, to bed.