Thoughts In and Out of Season 6

Nabokov’s Vanessa, Baseball’s new rules, Indra’s Net, a free vacation in Hell, exceptional exceptions, “Time” spent on the Dark Side...

1. It happened again. Here is a passage from a column I published about fourteen years ago called “On Butterflies and Being”:

[Nabokov] certainly would have been pleased by the potently exact synchrony of my experience on my porch and would surely have refused to ascribe it to chance; and I have to admit that, for a brief tremulous moment, I wondered if his spirit had not been teasing me, in a way simultaneously obvious and impenetrable.