Butterfly connections

Lepidopterology. What a beautiful word. In case you don’t know, it refers to the study of butterflies. Earlier today, I chanced upon the philosopher Nigel Warburton’s piece on the aesthetic case for butterfly preservation – a quirky short piece that got me thinking of the most famous lepidopterologist of all time – Nabokov.

I began this year with John Cheever’s journals and last week I also dipped into the first chapter of Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory. Somehow, his writing style was a tad too sophisticated for my liking. In a surprising coincidence, the very next day, I chanced upon this entry in Cheever’s journal about Nabokov:

I open Nabokov and am charmed by this spectrum of ambiguities, this marvelous atmosphere of untruth; and I am interested in his methods and find them very sympathetic, but his imagery — the shadow of a magician against a shimmery curtain, and all those sugared violets — is not mine. The house I was raised in had its charms, but my father hung his underwear from a nail he had driven into the back of the bathroom door, and while I know something about the Riviera I am not a Russian aristocrat polished in Paris. My prose style will always be to a degree matter-of-fact.

What I struggle to convey in a word, Cheever immortalizes in such prose. (Nabokov spent the last 16 years of his life in the hotel Montreux Palace in Lake Geneva, while Cheever struggled for most of his life)

PS: The Lucknow Zoo has a pretty butterfly-park which I managed to see last year. Worth checking out…