My friend P. quoted Nabokov recently – his story ‘Pnin gives a party’ from 1954 was reprinted in a recent issue of The New Yorker:

‘The collation of two legends, a precious detail of manners or dress, a reference checked and found to be falsified by incompetence or fraud, the spine thrill of a felicitous guess, and all the other innumerable triumphs of bezkorïstnïy (disinterested, devoted) scholarship had corrupted Pnin and made of him a happy, footnote-drugged maniac.’

Read the story here.

I would love to pronounce the word ‘bezkorïstnïy’ properly.

And of the manners in which man can be corrupted, Pnin’s corruption appears to be so innocent, so attractive.

A footnote-drugged maniac. This is how most of us end, as a footnote in other people’s papers, in other people’s memories.