Notes

All the definitions are taken from the most recent edition of the OED unless otherwise noted.

Page 13:
"John Francis Shade" has the sound of Francis Scott Key in it. Key was an American lawyer who in 1814 wrote the words to the United States of America's national anthem after a night of British naval bombardment on Fort McHenry at the Battle of Baltimore, War of 1812.

John Shade was born on July 5, 1898. Charles Kinbote and Jacob Gradus were also both born on July 5 (see 161, 275 respectively). They all die in 1959 (or at least evidence suggests that K has committed suicide). John Shade died July 21, 1959. VN's father died on July 21, 1922 (he was shot while attempting to prevent the assassination of a politician named Pavel Miliukov -- see p 298 and others). Queen Blenda dies on July 21 in the Zembla mirror world (where women are men? Then K's father dies on that day).

New Wye -> knew why: who "knew why"? The town? John Shade? Charles Kinbote?

"wye: 1. The letter Y. 2. Something shaped like a Y." (Webster's New Universal)
"wye: 1. The letter Y. 2. A kind of crotch." (Webster's Revised Unabridged)
"wye (OED): A support or other structure in a form resembling a Y; spec. (a) Plumbing a short pipe with a branch joining it at an acute angle; (b) Electrical Engineering = href="doc:18414"STAR; (c) an arrangement of three sections of railway track, used for turning locomotives."

New Wye: New Y: New York.

The Wye, a river in England, noted by Wordsworth in his poem "Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798" (a.k.a. "Tintern Abbey"). The poem is largely concerned with memory and the imaginative capacity of the mind to help create what it perceives. Note that July 13 is the middle of the date range of July 5 to July 21, and that John Shade was born 100 years after its composition. The text of Tintern Abbey: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww138.html

Perhaps it's worth contrasting Wordsworth's moving summer river of memory and growth with Shade's frozen winter lake of memory and death.

The ghost of Tintern Abbey

Appalachia, USA. Appalachia is a region formed by the Appalachian Mountains, which run from Quebec to Georgia, and are composed of several individual ranges (the main one in New York being the Adirondacks). The Appalachians on the eastern side of North America are -- in a sense -- *mirrored* by the Rocky Mountains in the west (though much smaller than the Rockies). It seems a general consensus that the town depicted in Pale Fire is actually Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University where VN taught (and Pynchon attended).

The manuscript: "consists of eighty medium-sized index cards". VN himself preferred this method of composition. Pale Fire (poem, commentary, etc) was literally written on index cards.

A poem in four cantos, a parody of Eliot's Four Quartets. But Shade is a Pope scholar, so Pope's Dunciad, a poem in four books with a preface, the poem, a commentary and notes.

Birds: Shade's parents were ornithologists (ln 72)
waxwing(1), pheasant(24), grouse(25), mockingbird(63), etc

A parhelion is a bright spot on a solar halo (parhelic circle) caused by ice crystals in the atmosphere. Parhelia can be colorful (resembling a rainbow, for which there are other references in PF) and symmetrically spaced.

For a full explanation
For photos
Maybe just because I'm a technology geek, this reminds me of lens flares. ("My eyes were such that literally they / took photographs" (ln 30-31)).

Page 15:
"I recall seeing him from my porch, on a brilliant morning, burning a whole stack of [index cards] in the pale fire of the incinerator before which he stood with bent head like an official mourner among the wind-borne black butterflies of that backyard auto-da-fe." (pg 15).

The words "pale fire" obviously stand out, black butterflies are associated with death and fire, and finally there is an allusion to Flaubert, the first many (many) literary plants in PF. From _Madam Bovary_:

"One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at last flew up the chimney." (Madam Bovary, Pt. 1, Ch. 9).

Page 16:
"a fantastic farrago of evil"
"farrago: A confused group; a medley, a mixture, a hotchpotch.


A. Burgess Such a repetitive farrago of platitudes. M. Gee A farrago of madness and morals and murder of the language."

Page 16-17:
"Golconda": "a mine, a rich source"

Page 18:
"[Sybil] and her changeful moods". The name Sybil can be found in Virgil; she tells Aeneus how to get to Hades, gives him a leaf from a tree. Apollo made her immortal but she ran from him; he was angered, so he allowed her to age forever -- she got older and older, smaller and smaller, until some boys put her into a bottle.

Sybil also shows up in Norse myth in the _Elder Edda_: she tells Odin about the creation of the gods and the world's end -- Ragnarök, Götterdämmerung -- when the witch of the Iron Wood breeds the wolf that eats the sun. (Sybil Shade's unmarried name is Irondell.) (See C.247, p. 171.)

Page 19:
"not a reticulation of deadly drafts"
"reticulation: 1. A network; an arrangement of interlacing lines etc. resembling a net; reticulated structure or appearance; Photography (the formation of) a network of wrinkles or cracks in a photographic emulsion. 2. A network of pipes used in irrigation and water supply. Chiefly Austral. & NZ."

Page 19-20:
Goldsworth, Wordsmith (see C.47-48, p. 82): twist these into Goldsmith and Wordsworth -- VN taught literature in Goldwin Smith Hall at Cornell; 18th century goldsmith: Shade is an expert on 18th century poets (see also Judge Goldsworth page 19 & page 267; Wordsmith College page 20); William Wordsworth: an important poet in this book; Cornell has a large Wordsmith collection.

Page 20:
"his abundant gray hair looked berimed in the sun"
"berime, berhyme: Compose rhymes about; lampoon in rhyme."

Page 20:
"A lane curving around the slight eminence on which my rented castle stood" puts Kinbote slightly above Shade (fitting for a King).

Page 21:
"the rubicund convives"
"rubicund: 1. Inclined to redness; red.
M. Amis From the country, where everything was good: the sack of wheat, the rubicund apple-rack.
2. Of the face, complexion, etc.: reddish, flushed, highly coloured, esp. as the result of good living. Of a person: having such a complexion. L17.
I. Rankin A rubicund man, hot and jacketless.., was dispensing the drinks."
"convive: A member of a company who eat together, a fellow feaster."

Page 21:
"lest a serious discussion of literature degenerate into mere facetiation."
presumably from "facetious"? The OED lists the correct noun form as "facetiousness":
"1. Of manners etc.: polished, urbane.
2. Given to or characterized by pleasantry or joking, now esp. where inappropriate or trivializing; witty, humorous, amusing.
J. Cheever The first was a facetious essay, attacking the modern toilet seat. "

Page 21:
"hoary forelock"
"hoary: 1. (Of hair) grey or white with age; grey-haired; ancient, venerable. Also, old and trite."

"forelock: 1. A lock of hair growing just above the forehead."

Page 21:
"was an extramural lady on crutches"
"extramural: 1. Situated or occurring outside the walls or boundaries of a town or city.

2. Pertaining to or designating instruction given under the auspices of a university or college but intended for people other than its students."

Page 22:
"Parthenocissus Hall": Parthenon, the main temple of Athena build around 400 BCE; and Narcissus, a Greek myth about a beautiful dude who fell in love with his own reflection and couldn't stop looking at it in a pool.

I also hear the word parthenogenesis here: "Biology. Reproduction from a gamete without fertilization, esp. as a normal process in invertebrates and lower plants. Formerly also, asexual reproduction, as by fission or budding"

"powerful Kramler": presumably referring to Daimler: a German engineer -- Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) -- who together with Karl Benz (1844-1929) and others created the first lightweight, high-speed internal combustion engine for a land vehicle; and an automobile manufacturer: Daimler-Benz (now Daimler-Chrysler).

Page 25:
"The Hally Vally" and "confusing Odin's Hall with the title of a Finnish epic": The Norse Valhalla, home of the gods where those they favor may go when they die, linked with the Finnish Kalevala epic about the folk hero Kaleva.

Page 26:
"Hogarthian tippler":
"hogarthian: Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the English satirical painter and caricaturist William Hogarth (1697–1764) or his style of painting."

William Hogarth (1697-1764), an English artist whose engravings satirized the affectations of time. http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/main.html

"tippler: A person who tipples; a habitual drinker of alcohol, esp. in small quantities."

Page 29:
"Oct. 19, 1959, Cedarn, Utana" Utana is a synthesis of Utah and Montana (on the border with Idoming -- see 182) and also rings with Ultima (as in Ultima Thule). Kinbote is informed by the Shade's (p. 182) that they intend to vacation here after the completion of John's poem.

Summary / Commentary

The Foreword acts in some ways as sort of an overture for the novel; all the themes are more or less here in miniature, paraded around on the eloquent madness of Kinbote's prose. The first few pages take the reader from an initial sense of normalcy -- an academic introduction to a work of literature by a critical scholar -- through gradual stages of disorientation until it becomes clear that Kinbote isn't what he pretends to be. The narrator's personality, complete with its delusions, mad convictions, and persecution mania, intrudes upon the writing, batters its form, but also moves the narrative forward.

The first such intrusions are subtle: the "amusing birds", the odd and inexplicable "your favorite" and "shocking tour de force" in paragraph two, the first-person pronoun and shift in diction in the next paragraph, none of which are enough to keep the sudden intrusion at the end of that paragraph from being completely jarring: "There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings," much as it must be for Kinbote, given that *it* has intruded into the text, has taken the narrator over for a moment. Plainly, the circumstances of K's composition, and those of his mind, will continue to influence the story. See page 28 where he complains: "that carrousel [is] inside and outside my head."

The amusement park has several other implications: 1) Kinbote is not quite right in the head; 2) the text we read has not been professionally edited or proofed -- seeming like a manuscript; and 3) Kinbote is also a character in this work.

The normally rigid border between art and life -- the circumstances in which art is created -- have been blurred, vividly and abruptly, very *loudly* as it were. In parallel, one of Kinbote's main themes is his striving to merge with art, to enter the poem, to become a fairy tale, mirrored by his obsessive attempts to intrude on Shade's personal life.

Page 13:
"Pale Fire, a poem in heroic couplets, of nine hundred ninety-nine lines, divided into four cantos": a poem in heroic couplets with 999 lines? One may be rightfully perplexed before the end of the first sentence. Boyd points out it's like saying "that a family has nine children, all twins" (_Magic of Artistic Discovery_, 17).

Pale Fire is at once the name of the poem, the name of what Kinbote offers as the larger work, and ultimately the name of VN's work.

Kinbote with this volume presents "Pale Fire" the poem to the public for the first time. Here begins a theme about the role and function of criticism for art and within art. One might construe it as a particularly dim view, but is it really? VN had his share of grumbles in relation to critics, but has published his own critical work on Pushkin.

John Francis Shade --> John Francis Key: why is the key missing from the name? (Hiding in the shade?) The key to what? Where's the key to John Shade?

Obviously much can be made of the name "Shade". It reminds one of "Haze" from Lolita; it has a sense of secrecy and ambiguity. It can (and will be) linked to "shadow". A shade is also something you might pull down in front of a window, frustrating all the little Kinbotes out there. Windows are an important prop in PF, as is other kinds of glass.

Wordsworth is implied through "New Wye" (see Forward - Notes); WW wants to end the 18th century, destroy the heroic couplet, and writes to himself of himself like Shade.

Sybil's name (see Forward - Notes), had the three main stages of western movement in it: Sybil (Scandinavia) --> Irondell (France) --> Shade (America).

Canto One: 166 lines on 13 index cards. Kinbote is amused by the birds. He might have also noted the preponderance of trees in Canto One: larch(16), hickory(34), no tree(43), shagbark(49).
Canto Two: 334 lines on 27 index cards. This is "your favorite". Whose favorite? Is Kinbote predicting the reader's response? Or is he speaking to someone in particular? (Proponents of the Shade-wrote-it-all theory -- the "Shadeans" -- will claim the pronoun refers to Sybil since Canto Two has mostly to do with her and Hazel, and because VN refers to his wife Véra in this manner in Speak Memory.)
Canto Three: 334 lines on 27 index cards. "That shocking tour de force". Why shocking? Presumably to Kinbote because of its ruminations on God and afterlife?
Canto Four: 166 lines (-1) on 13 index cards. "the last four [cards] give a Corrected Draft instead of a Fair Copy." Second indication that all is not well at the end of the poem's composition.

Page 14:
On page 14 we have our first example of Kinbote asserting his own certainty about Shade's poem in the face of dubious evidence. The last third of the text of Canto 4, we are told, is "extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions," but these strong adjectives notwithstanding, Kinbote insists the text is "beautifully accurate." Indeed, it is exactly their questionable quality that seems to make Kinbote all the more certain -- a man more in tune with his own beliefs and convictions than with facts and evidence. Or perhaps this is Kinbote's "tell", the indication we as readers will have that he might be bluffing, or even lying. He retreats into more colorful language at these moments: "the limpid depths under its confused surface", and acquires an accusatory tone: "compel yourself to open your eyes".

By the second page then, Kinbote has become querulous and argumentative, very different from the narrator of the first page, and this sets the tone for his conflict over the manuscript and his role as the poem's commentator.

"This fact would be sufficient to show that the imputations made (on July 24, 1959) in a newspaper interview with one of our professed Shadeans [...] is a malicious invention on the part of those who would wish not so much to deplore the state in which a great poet's work was interrupted by death as to asperse the competence, and perhaps honesty, of its present editor and commentator."

"None can say how long John Shade planned his poem to be, but it is not improbably that what he left represents only a small fraction of the composition he saw in a glass, darkly." Of note is the tension between K and the other scholars at WU as to Shade's intention for "Pale Fire". Also note another glass reference.

Page 15:
Another contrast between Shade and Kinbote on p. 15: Kinbote has a "long-limbed gait", while Shade has a "jerky shuffle". For contrasts between K and S, we have the following:

Kinbote: distracted, crazed, unstructured, homosexual, vegetarian, prose-oriented, religious, Zemblan.

Shade: meticulous, ordered, structured, heterosexual, carnivorous, poetry-oriented, agnostic, American.

In terms of appearance, they are each the opposite of their writing. Kinbote is a reversal, a *mirror* of Shade.

Thesis: Shade -- writes the poem.
Antithesis: Kinbote -- writes the commentary.
Synthesis: VN??? -- writes _Pale Fire_.... But also Gradus.

It's a full-time occupation picking out mirrored pairs and their syntheses/transformations in this book. At the very start we have a poem and a commentary (although the latter would seem to depend on the former, we have them both at once), Shade and Kinbote are in many ways mirror images, and often there will be some third part that supplies the synthesis (for instance Gradus as the third part to the Shade-Kinbote pair -- see Index). Is it the wings that make the butterfly? Could the butterfly exist without the body? Could tennis exist without the net?

Also involved with the mirroring is the process of combining the parts in to some new whole, as with VN's _Speak Memory_ quote concerning the spiral. K's advice to merge the commentary and the poem (manually!), or otherwise purchase "two copies of the same work which can then be placed in adjacent positions". (pg. 28). Hegelian dialectic -- thesis & antithesis = synthesis

For VN's quotes on spirals and synthesis

"died July 21" (pg 13)
"hearing my poor friend's own voice proclaim on the evening of July 21 the end" (pg 15).
VN's father died on July 21

K asserts on p. 15 that only one line of the poem remained to be written, and that it was intended to be identical to line 1. Given the way this assertion is set up, with K and S's apparent friendship, the reader is likely to assume the veracity of this statement.

The poem, as described by Kinbote on p. 15, would be structurally symmetrical if the final line had been added. Thus more mirrors: the last line mirroring the first, Cantos One and Two mirroring Cantos Three and Four as halves (as with a butterfly), but also in size: Canto One mirroring Canto Four and Canto Two mirroring Canto Three (a mirror within a mirror).

Does the missing final line make "Pale Fire" structurally unsound?

Page 15:
"deform the faces of his crystal" (15)
"He consulted his wrist watch. A snowflake settled upon it. 'Crystal to crystal,' said Shade." (22)
Also see line 12 of "Pale Fire": "Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!"


Crystals supply a linkage between structure and time. They are a simple example of how the patterns discovered in the natural world may be employed in order to locate and define abstract concepts. A crystal will also cause refraction when light passes through it, and this furthers the idea of filtration in PF, of thing mutating when passing through filters like translators, commentators, historians, the very act of communication from one to another.

"(See my note to line 991.)" The only cross-reference in the Foreword. A reader who follows it and the subsequent ones from that note returns with a very different impression of Kinbote and PF than if they had not. There is therefore a kind of bifurcation of readers that takes place here.

This cross-reference is also the first of several indications that the Foreword has been written last or close to last, after the Commentary. This becomes somewhat significant later, as contradictions begin appearing.

Page 16:
"and that on publication day the manuscript would be handed over to the Library of Congress for permanent preservation." -- This idea of permanent preservation must be attractive to Kinbote. If "Pale Fire" is to forever preserve Zembla and its former King, then something else, some other container, must preserve the physical matter of the book. He travels to the Library of Congress at some point later, perhaps to look over the site of his future entombment.

Page 16-17:
"another person ([Shade's] former literary agent) has wondered with a sneer if Mrs. Shade's tremulous signature might not have been penned 'in some peculiar kind of red ink.'"

Red is the color most associated with King Charles II (see 133 for instance). Also, a "peculiar kind of red ink" implies a deal with the devil.

Page 17:
"One of our sillier Zemblan proverbs says: _the lost glove is happy_." This is the first reference to Zembla.

Next paragraph, "historical personage" is the first reference to K's elevated importance.

"As mentioned, I think, in my last note to the poem." (pg 17). More evidence the Foreword was written last.

Page 18:
"I alone am responsible for any mistakes in my commentary." Kinbote's acknowledgement is further evidence that his manuscript has not been proof-read or edited by anyone other than himself.

"my cave in Cedarn": Kinbote's present whereabouts and the first (very veiled) allusion to _Timon of Athens_ (see p. 79)

"the Goldsworthian château": See C. 12, p. 76 for Kinbote's rented home in Zembla.

Page 20:
Kinbote's first attempted meeting with the Shades is a failed intrusion, setting the stage for K's impotent desire to shove himself into their life (preferably when the wife's away).

Page 21:
The reference to the girl that Kinbote implies Shade is having an affair with. Also see p. 228.

Page 22:
"two ping-pong tables in my basement": a mirrored pair and another example of a synthesis of two parts. Ping-pong is associated with sex with young boys for Kinbote, often describing them as ping-pong partners. Something about the sound of the words "ping" and "pong" I think, but I'm not sure I wish to pursue this idea.... [I hear Zappa singing, "I've never plooked a tiny chrome-plated machine that looks like a magical pig with marital aids stuck all over it such as yourself before...." -- but that's probably more because of "bad Bob" (see below).]

"Main Hall (or now Shade Hall, alas)" -- it's unclear whether Kinbote bemoans the reminder that Shade is dead or that it's not now named Kinbote Hall or perhaps Zembla Hall.

"I wanted to buy some chocolate-coated cookies" -- one gets the sense Kinbote buys all sorts of stuff lure young boys home.

"From the inside of the supermarket, through a plate-glass window, I saw the old chap pop into a liquor store." Another glass window. This is actually the first time we catch Kinbote spying on Shade, and it's not from the Goldsworth house.

"A comfortable burp told me he had a flask of brandy concealed about his warmly coated person." Shade is not permitted by Sybil to drink, so he hides liquor from her (on his bookshelf behind the bust of Dante if I recall correctly).

Page 23:
"Henceforth I began seeing more and more of my celebrated neighbor. The view from one of my windows kept providing me with first-rate entertainment, especially when I was on the wait for some tardy guest." Now Kinbote has begun spying on Shade in earnest. I find it interesting that this act is linked to waiting for one of his lovers to show up, as if spying on Shade is a voyeuristic sublimation of his sexual desire. Kinbote's attitude toward Shade is made sexual in a number of places (e.g. see note to 991, page 287, 2nd paragraph).

"From the second story of my house the Shades' living-room window remained clearly visible so long as the branches of the deciduous trees between us were still bare" -- the first reference (immediate upon his beginning to spy on them) to Kinbote's having to vie with nature in order to conduct his voyeurism (see also p. 86, etc). Is Kinbote's behavior made to seem therefore "unnatural"? At odds with the natural patterns of the world?

"One knew that bedtime was closing in with all its terrors" -- the first reference to Kinbote's trouble with the night and his paranoid fears of assassination. This can be treated in a number of ways: true paranoia, simple yearning for Shade's company, simple loneliness, isolation, despair.

Page 24:
"And sometimes Sybil Shade would trip by with the velocity and swinging arms of one flouncing out in a fit of temper" -- here really begins the theme of Kinbote's jealousy toward Sybil and his misogyny. On 18 he refers to her as a misguided widow, but his reason is explained in the context of his ongoing struggle to publish the manuscript. Now it's grown into something more, and later it will only get more intense (see 91 for instance: "so rapt a look on her face that one might have supposed she had just thought up a new recipe.").

"the riddle of her behavior was entirely solved one night when by dialing their number and watching their window at the same time I magically induced her to go through the hasty and quite innocent motions that had puzzled me." Kinbote playing with the Shades' as a cat with a mouse; a first and rather ominous indication that his sense of their existence is as it pertains to himself, machiavellian and solipsistic. This too gets worse.

Page 25:
"I overheard a young instructor in a green velvet jacket, whom I shall mercifully call Gerald Emerald, carelessly saying in answer to something the secretary had asked: 'I guess Mr. Shade has already left with the Great Beaver.'" Here we meet Gerald Emerald for the first time. There's something about Emerald.... He seems more important than the amount of text he's given. Kinbote has a particularly fierce amount of animosity toward him; it's implied in the index that some brief tryst took place between them: "[Kinbote's] loathing for a person who makes advances, and then betrays a noble and naïve heart, telling foul stories about his victim and pursuing him with brutal practical jokes" (309); Emerald is linked to the greater shadow that gives Gradus the general location of King Charles: "He [the shadow] was a merry, perhaps overmerry, fellow in a green velvet jacket. Nobody liked him" (255); Emerald produces the photograph of Charles II for Kinbote's Wordsmith colleagues (267); he reads best-sellers (lowbrow to Kinbote) and takes Gradus to the Goldsworth château (283) -- thus also giving Gradus the *specific* location of King Charles. There's also some evidence that Emerald himself is Zemblan (see 268-269 where Emerald spreads his palms before offering to shake hands, a Zemblan custom linked to Gradus on page 197). I don't know where this all leads, there's just *something* about Emerald.... If anyone has an idea about his real name and identity I would love to hear it.

Page 26:
The description of Shade as "his own cancellation." On page 176 Oswin Bretwit is described in similar terms.

"I have one photograph of him." A present tense passage frozen in the image of the photograph, where one of Kinbote's hands remains "half-raised -- not to pat Shade on the shoulder as seems to be the intention, but to remove my sunglasses which, however, it never reached in *that* life, the life of the picture", quickly digressing into the betrayal of bad Bob, but returning on the next page: "He is looking from the terrace (of Prof. C.'s house on that March evening) at the distant lake. I am looking at him. I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse."

One of my favorite passages in PF; Shade is given VN's own sense of what makes good fiction: magic, combining the elements of the world to create art. We later learn much more about that lake, and about other lakes off in other distances. This one is really "three conjoined lakes called Omega, Ozero, and Zero" (p. 92), so when Shade looks out from Prof. C's terrace, he's looking out beyond time, beyond Omega, beyond the Zero [allusion for Doug]; from that frozen moment in the photograph off into eternity. See also, Gulf of Surprise on 138, and Dim Gulf on line 957.

Page 27:
"bad Bob": Bob is a mirror name, two 'b's surrounding an 'o', has the feel of a butterfly, in this case two, since "bad" is another mirror word. See more Bob on p. 97

Page 28:
"I stared at [the conjurer's] powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation" -- White is associated with creative forces, while black is associated with destructive forces (see p. 15). Rainbows of colors are employed as transformations from one state to another.

"Shade's poem is, indeed, that sudden flourish of magic."

Page 28-29
"Let me state that without my notes Shade's text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his [...] has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide" -- Synthesis of poem and commentary; the commentary provides the patterns that are essential to the essence of the poem, but could not exist without it; each side is unfinished, but the synthesis makes them whole. A metaphor for love/marriage? Still it is interesting that Kinbote feels compelled to insist upon the "human reality" that his contribution makes.