I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online Page A

amateur author!
    In conjunction with this collegial testimony, we must also note Nabokov’s own continual (and beautifully stated) affirmation of his love and devotion to all aspects of a professional lepidopterist’s life. On the joys of fieldwork and collecting, he effuses in a letter to Edmund Wilson in 1942 (quoted in Zimmer, page 30): “Try, Bunny, it is the noblest sport in the world.” Of the tasks traditionallydeemed more dull and trying—the daily grind of the laboratory and microscope—he waxed with equal ardor in a letter to his sister in 1945, in the midst of his Harvard employment (in Zimmer, page 29):
    My laboratory occupies half of the fourth floor. Most of it is taken up by rows of cabinets, containing sliding cases of butterflies. I am custodian of these absolutely fabulous collections. We have butterflies from all over the world. . . . Along the windows extend tables holding my microscopes, test tubes, acids, papers, pins, etc. I have an assistant, whose main task is spreading specimens sent by collectors. I work on my personal research . . . a study of the classification of American “blues” based on the structure of their genitalia (minuscule sculpturesque hooks, teeth, spurs, etc., visible only under the microscope), which I sketch in with the aid of various marvelous devices, variants of the magic lantern. . . . My work enraptures but utterly exhausts me. . . . To know that no one before you has seen an organ you are examining, to trace relationships that have occurred to no one before, to immerse yourself in the wondrous crystalline world of the microscope, where silence reigns, circumscribed by its own horizon, a blindingly white arena—all this is so enticing that I cannot describe it.
    Nabokov worked so long and so intensely in grueling and detailed observation of tiny bits of insect anatomy that his eyesight became permanently compromised—thus placing him in the company of several of history’s most famous entomologists, especially Charles Bonnet in the eighteenth century and August Weismann in the nineteenth, who sacrificed their sight to years of eye-straining work. In a television interview in 1971, Nabokov stated (Zimmer, page 29):
    Most of my work was devoted to the classification of certain small blue butterflies on the basis of their male genitalic structure. These studies required the constant use of a microscope, and since I devoted up to six hours daily to this kind of research my eyesight was impaired forever; but on the other hand, the years at the Harvard Museum remain the most delightful and thrilling in all my adult life.
    Nonetheless, and as a touching, final testimony to his love and dedication to entomology, Nabokov stated in a 1975 interview (Zimmer, page 218) that hisenthusiasm would still pull him inexorably in (“like a moth to light” one is tempted to intone) if he ever allowed impulse to vanquish bodily reality:
    Since my years at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Harvard, I have not touched a microscope, knowing that if I did, I would drown again in its bright well. Thus I have not, and probably never shall, accomplish the greater part of the entrancing research work I had imagined in my young mirages.
    Thus, in conclusion to this section, we cannot adopt the first solution to “the paradox of intellectual promiscuity” by arguing that Nabokov’s lepidoptery represents only the harmless diversion of an amateur hobbyist, ultimately stealing no time that he might realistically have spent writing more novels. Nabokov loved his butterflies as much as his literature. He worked for years as a fully professional taxonomist, publishing more than a dozen papers that have stood the test of substantial time.
    Can we therefore invoke the second solution by arguing that time lost to literature for the sake of lepidoptery nonetheless enhanced his novels, or at least distinguished his