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[...] On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the look-out for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight. It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin whose business it was to set it straight. His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence. He was inept with his hands to a rare degree; but because he could manufacture in a twinkle a one-note mouth-organ out a pea pod, make a flat pebble skip ten times on the surface of a pond, shadowgraph with his knuckles a rabbit (complete with blinking eye), and perform a number of other tame tricks that Russians have up their sleeves, he believed himself endowed with considerable manual and mechanical skill. On gadgets he doted with a kind of dazed, superstitious delight. [...]
cute
[...] Liza Bogolepov, a medical student just turned twenty, and perfectly charming in her black silk jumper and tailor-made skirt, was already working at the Meudon sanatorium directed by that remarkable and formidable old lady, Dr Rosetta Stone, one of the most destructive psychiatrists of the day; and, moreover, Liza wrote verse--mainly in halting anapaest; indeed, Pnin saw her for the first time at one of those literary soirees where young emigre poets, who bad left Russia in their pale, unpampered pubescence, chanted nostalgic elegies dedicated to a country that could be little more to them than a sad stylized toy, a bauble found in the attic, a crystal globe which you shake to make a soft luminous snowstorm inside over a minuscule fir tree and a log cabin of papier mache. Pnin wrote her a tremendous love letter--now safe in a private collection--and she read it with tears of self-pity while recovering from a pharmacopoeial attempt at suicide because of a rather silly affair with a litterateur who is now--But no matter. Five analysts, intimate friends of hers, all said: 'Pnin--and a baby at once.'
He also perused the current item in a tremendously long and tedious controversy between three emigre factions. It had started by Faction A's accusing Faction B of inertia and illustrating it by the proverb. 'He wishes to climb the fir tree but is afraid to scrape his shins.' This had provoked an acid Letter to the Editor from' An Old Optimist', entitled 'Fir Trees and Inertia' and beginning: 'There is an old American saying "He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone".' In the present issue, there was a two-thousand-word feuilleton contributed by a representative of Faction C and headed 'On Fir Trees, Glass Houses, and Optimism', and Pnin read this with great interest and sympathy.
lol
Before leaving the library, he decided to look up the correct pronunciation of 'interested', and discovered that Webster, or at least the battered 1930 edition lying on a table in the Browsing Room, did not place the stress accent on the third syllable, as he did. He sought a list of errata at the back, failed to find one, and, upon closing the elephantine lexicon, realized with a pang that he had immured somewhere in it the index card with notes that he had been holding all this time. Must now search and search through 2,500 thin pages, some torn! On hearing his interjection, suave Mr Case, a lank, pink-faced librarian with sleek white hair and a bow-tie, strolled up, took up the colossus by both ends, inverted it, and gave it a slight shake, whereupon it shed a pocket comb, a Christmas card, Pnin's notes, and a gauzy wraith of tissue paper, which descended with infinite listlessness to Pnin's feet and was replaced by Mr Case on the Great Seals of the United States and Territories.
i just like this
Hagen, playing his last card, suggested Pnin could teach a French Language course: like many Russians, our friend had had a French governess as a child, and after the Revolution he lived in Paris for more than fifteen years.
'You mean,' asked Blorenge sternly, 'he can speak French?'
Hagen, who was well aware of Blorenge's special requirements, hesitated.
'Out with it, Herman! Yes or no?'
'I am sure he could adapt himself.'
'He does speak it, eh?'
'Well, yes.'
'In that case,' said Blorenge, 'we can't use him in First-Year French. It would be unfair to our Mr Smith, who gives the elementary course this term and, naturally, is required to be only one lesson ahead of his students. Now it so happens that Mr Hashimoto needs an assistant for his overflowing group in Intermediate French. Does your man read French as well as speak it?'
'I repeat, he can adapt himself,' hedged Hagen.
'I know what adaptation means,' said Blorenge, frowning. 'In 1950, when Hash was away, I engaged that Swiss skiing instructor and he smuggled in mimeo copies of some old French anthology. It took us almost a year to bring the class back to its initial level. Now, if what's-his-name does not read French--'
'I'm afraid he does,' said Hagen with a sigh.
'Then we can't use him at all. As you know, we believe only in speech records and other mechanical devices. No books are allowed.'
lmao
I am so constituted that I absolutely must gulp down the juice of three oranges before confronting the rigours of day. So at seven-thirty I took a quick shower, and five minutes later was out of the house in the company of the long-eared and dejected Sobakevich.
why is this so funny
The 1954 Fall Term had begun. Again the marble neck of a homely Venus in the vestibule of Humanities Hall received the vermilion imprint, in applied lipstick, of a mimicked kiss. Again the Waindell Recorder discussed the Parking Problem. Again in the margins of library books earnest freshmen inscribed such helpful glosses as 'Description of Nature', or 'Irony'; and in a pretty edition of Mallarme poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word oiseaux and scrawled above it 'birds'. [...]
lmao
[...] Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and
economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. [...] It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. [...]
[...] By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash [...] it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking. [...]
[...] A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. The will construct your sentences for
you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. [...]