Free I Have Landed by Stephen Jay Gould

adequately one must have complete knowledge of the thing. I would be the laughing stock of my entomological colleagues if they happened to see these impossible hybrids.
    In reading through all Nabokov’s butterfly references (in his literary works) as preparation for writing this essay, I was struck most of all by his passion for accuracy in every detail of anatomy, behavior, or location. Even his poetical or metaphorical descriptions capture a common visual impression—as when he writes in “The Aurelian,” a story from 1930, about “an oleander hawk [moth] . . . its wings vibrating so rapidly that nothing but a ghostly nimbus was visible about its streamlined body.” Even his occasional fantasies and in-jokes, accessible only to a few initiates (or readers of such study guides as Zimmer’s) build upon a strictly factual substrate. For example, Nabokov thought he had discovered a new species of butterfly during his Russian boyhood. He wrote a description in English and sent the note to a British entomologist for publication.But the English scientist discovered that Nabokov’s species had already been named in 1862 by a German amateur collector named Kretschmar, in an obscure publication. So Nabokov bided his time and finally chose a humorous form of revenge in his novel
Laughter in the Dark
(quoted in Zimmer, page 141): “Many years later, by a pretty fluke (I know I should not point out these plums to people), I got even with the first discoverer of my moth by giving his own name to a blind man in a novel.”
    Literary critics sometimes chided Nabokov for his obsessive attention to detail. Nabokov, in true form, described these attacks with a witty (and somewhat cryptic) taxonomic reference—speaking in
Strong Opinions
(quoted in Zimmer, page 175) of detractors “accusing me of being more interested in the subspecies and the subgenus than in the genus and the family.” (Subspecies and subgenera represent categories for fine subdivision of species and genera. The rules of nomenclature recognize these categories as available for convenience, but not required in practice. That is, species need not be divided into subspecies, nor genera into subgenera. But genera and families represent basic and more inclusive divisions that must be assigned to all creatures. That is, each species must belong to a genus, and each genus to a family.)
    Nabokov generalized his defense of meticulous detail beyond natural history and literature to all intellectual concerns. In a 1969 interview, he scornfully dismissed critics who branded such insistence upon detail as a form of pedantry (my translation from Nabokov’s French, as cited in Zimmer, page 7): “I do not understand how one can label the knowledge of natural objects or the vocabulary of nature as pedantry.” In annotating his personal copy of the French translation
of Ada
, Nabokov listed the three unbreakable rules for a good translator: intimate knowledge of the language from which one translates; experience as a writer of the language into which one translates; and (the third great dictate of detail) “that one knows, in both languages, the words designating concrete objects (natural and cultural, the flower and the clothing)” (my translation from Nabokov’s French original, cited in Zimmer, page 5).
    Zimmer (page 8) epitomizes the central feature of Nabokov’s butterfly citations: “They are all real butterflies, including the invented ones which are mimics of real ones. And they usually are not just butterflies in general, but precisely the ones that would occur at that particular spot, behaving exactly the way they really would. Thus they underscore, or rather help constitute, the veracity of a descriptive passage.” In an insightful statement, Zimmer (page 7) then generalizes this biological usage to an overarching Nabokovian principle with both aesthetic and moral components:
    Both the