![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/162\/2014\/04\/Automeris-egeus-moth-300x165.jpg\" "\\"Automeris-egeus-moth\\"")
<\/a>I go on binges. For days, weeks, months\u2014well, usually not months\u2014but days and weeks anyhow, I get taken by something and it will be all that interests me for a while. I\u2019ll plunge into Faulkner for a time, then breach, crest, and fall into Graham Greene.<\/p>\nThings don\u2019t stay all that highbrow, either; I\u2019m as apt to watch Duck Dynasty<\/em> marathons as I am to read books. Then again, I might forswear all such pursuits and go into serious training to beat the last five folks who\u2019ve registered their bragging rights on the gym treadmill.<\/p>\nI was well into an Anthony Burgess tear not long back before I got pulled off on another line. This time it was Nabokov. It started around Christmas and picked up when the holidays were over.<\/p>\n
After Lolita<\/em> (and the movie version), Pale Fire<\/em>, The Defense <\/em>(that movie version too\u2014called The Luzhin Defence<\/em>) and Pnin<\/em>\u2014which you have to re-read and ask yourself why you didn\u2019t see X before, or notice Y\u2014I stumbled upon an essay in the March 2014 edition of First Things<\/em> by David Bentley Hart, entitled Nabokov\u2019s Supernatural Secret<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019d known about the author\u2019s interest in the world of chess, for which he enjoyed constructing elaborate problems. I knew about his fascinating malady (if you can call it that), synesthesia<\/em>\u00b8 which makes a person see numbers, and sometimes letters, as colors. I also knew about Nabokov\u2019s deep, lifelong pursuit of insects, particularly moths and butterflies. But what I learned from the essay was an inkling of perhaps what most attracted the writer to these things.<\/p>\nHe was captivated with mimicry, says Hart, especially when nature went far beyond what \u201cevolutionary imperatives\u201d demanded\u2014for example, when a butterfly\u2019s shape and color mimicked more than just a beautiful leaf, but threw in amazing recreations of \u201cgrub-bored holes\u201d\u2014an extravagance that defied the level of defense that natural selection would require. Surely the praying mantis isn\u2019t so visually adept that the shadings of the grub holes must come within a million degrees of similarity.<\/p>\n
For Nabokov, this amounted to \u201ca constant victory of the beautiful over the needful in nature.\u201d In the \u201cspecular harmonies and morphological allusions that passed between species\u2026he believed he had found signs of something like a conjuror\u2019s pleasure in complex illusions. \u2018I discovered in nature,\u2019\u201d he wrote, \u201c\u2018the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
What seemed just outside the borders of nature, and just outside the frame of Nabokov\u2019s art, was the realm of the spirits. That is the context, suggests Hart, lying behind the artist\u2019s world, the one that surrounds it with a spectral luminescence\u2014as quiet as sunlight falling, but just as bright and warm.<\/p>\n
The man never spoke of such things, and seemed to find any overt commentary or expression to be distasteful. But it goes some ways towards accounting for the strangeness of his tales. The land of the souls, and their influence on the living, is never far from his imaginative universe. Sometimes his characters burst through the paper world in which they live and enter that land, like a Platonic prisoner finally free of his mortal chains, one who turns from the shadow-playing wall, faces the form-dancing fire. See Bend Sinister, <\/em>for example.<\/p>\nI think Hart\u2019s line that strikes me as the most resonant is this one: \u201cthe victory of the beautiful over the needful.<\/em>\u201d That is perhaps the best articulation of something that lurks behind the suspicions of even the most die-hard empiricists and materialists.<\/p>\nWhy the beautiful? At least, why this<\/em> much beauty? Why the luxury of it all? Why the splendor? There is a need in life, yes\u2014to be protected, to be satisfied\u2014nature serves us there. But to be awed? What need we of that?<\/p>\nTo quote another great artist, Shakespeare has Lear answer his utilitarian-minded daughters\u2019 insistence that he \u201cneeds not\u201d the number of retainers that he enjoys, not when their own men could serve him just as well. Considering their household staffs, he needs not one hundred men, not fifty, not ten, not even one\u2014or so they say.<\/p>\n
\u201cReason not the need<\/em>,\u201d he replies.
\nOur basest beggars
\nAre in the poorest thing superfluous.
\nAllow not nature more than nature needs,
\nMan\u2019s life\u2019s as cheap as beast\u2019s.<\/em><\/p>\nAye, there\u2019s the rub. Superfluity. The thing that captivated Shakespeare, Hopkins, a host of others\u2014and Nabokov among them. But then, how could it not captivate a man for whom 5<\/em> looked red, and for whom the chrysalis was pregnant with the noumenon?<\/p>\nThere is something about the inefficiency of beauty that speaks against the strategies of the purely empirical. I was never convinced by Dawkins\u2019 Selfish Gene <\/em>claim that all our poetry, our sacrifices and mercies, are merely a sinister plot to get our chromosomes a few more years on the materialist clock.<\/p>\nIf you behold the icy majesty of Everest, the blustery effusion of Bridal Veil Falls\u2014for that matter, if you ponder the vastness of an eternal space, one that expands to a point where blackness cracks its own sinews, or one that contracts to a point that blood swallows its own cells\u2014this flood of plenitude resounds all the more. For beauty does not seek its adequate, proportionate level. It is not like water that will find a place to lie flat, or a temperature at which to freeze or boil. It always exceeds the mark; indeed, if it did not, would we even call it beauty?<\/p>\n
So for me, a Nabokovian apostle, it just seems too simple, too reductionist, too stubborn, all in all, to defy the glories of the butterfly. It seems unwise to attribute its mimicry to nothing more than device\u2014to blind oneself to the shimmering profligacy, to the reckless lavishness, to the spendthrift excess of a world far, far, more beautiful than it really need be.<\/p>\n
This post was made possible through the support of a grant from The BioLogos Foundation\u2019s Evolution and Christian Faith program. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of BioLogos.<\/em><\/p>\nA.G. Harmon<\/strong><\/a> teaches Shakespeare, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence, and Writing at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His novel, A House All Stilled, <\/em>won the 2001 Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel.
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<\/a>I go on binges. For days, weeks, months\u2014well, usually not months\u2014but days and weeks anyhow, I get taken by something and it will be all that interests me for a while. I\u2019ll plunge into Faulkner for a time, then breach, crest, and fall into Graham Greene.<\/p>\n