September 19 Friday roundup

For the most recent episode of the podcast, I wrote about how RFK Jr.’s attack on science and expertise is part a larger attempt to make the president and his circle the source of all information in the country. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

Today, I want to say something about how the persistence of the past can be not just a burden but also a gift. More than a decade ago, I wrote my first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. The details in that book dove into Nabokov’s life and writing, especially his novels Lolita and Pale Fire.

Pale Fire is a wild ride with an unreliable narrator. It includes recurring appearances from a Vanessa atalanta butterfly—formerly known as the Red Admirable—a velvety black-winged insect with white spots and red streaks on its wings. The poet John Shade, one of two main characters in the book, refers to his wife in a 999-line poem as his “Admirable butterfly.” And in the last lines of the same poem, likely all-but-finished moments before its author is murdered, a “dark Vanessa with a crimson band” appears.

In a 1970 interview, Nabokov declared the Red Admirable a “splendid” butterfly. He noted that it was known in Northern Russia as “The Butterfly of Doom,” because the pattern on the underside of its wings “seemed to read ‘1881,’” the year that Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.

Brian Boyd—who worked with Nabokov’s widow Véra on a two-volume biography of the author—wrote his own book about Pale Fire, suggesting that the butterfly in the novel is the spirit of the poet’s dead daughter, trying to warn her father about his impending death.

***

In 2008, the year I started working on my Nabokov book, the Washington Post published an article by Dan Southerland, a longtime reporter for the paper. In the story, he described his apparent friendship the summer before with one particular Vanessa atalanta.

Southerland wrote about how the butterfly had landed on him and visited long enough for him to think of visiting a photography shop to get their picture taken together. It then went to lunch with him and a colleague, where the restaurant staff determined that the butterfly would probably enjoy overripe fruit. They gave it some strawberries.

After the meal, the creature got in a cab with him and rode from DC to Maryland. It took up residence in his backyard, where it came to sit with him day after day, perching on his head or his glasses, and seemingly waiting for him to come home the same time nearly ever day for more than a month.

His wife and coworker had seen many of these encounters. In time, he brought family members and neighbors to see the butterfly, too. A spiritually minded acquaintance was sure that the butterfly was someone from a past life who had come to visit.

"He's trying to tell you something," she said.

***

I was delighted when, without any input from me, the designer for my Nabokov book included a red-and-black butterfly on the front cover in 2013. I even tried—unsuccessfully—to get him to shift it to perfectly mimic the Vanessa atalanta’s eyespots and other markings.

The Vanessa atalanta itself wasn’t an important part of my book, but it felt like a little benediction from the mascot of Nabokov’s novel for its cousin to grace the cover of mine.

Though it informed all three of the books I’ve written, the Nabokov project seems very far away now. But I sometimes think of his family, facing persecution from both Tsar Nicholas II and Vladimir Lenin, later winding up in Germany under Hitler and fleeing to France, escaping just before it fell to the Nazis. We’re now living through our own brutal moment, with masked men sweeping people off the streets and networks under threat for making jokes about the nation’s leader.

Even the past is never as far away as I imagine. Just this month, a scholar writing about how her own family was ravaged by the Holocaust reached out to me to find out if her mother’s employer had been on the same ship that carried the Nabokovs to America in 1940. I pulled the passenger roster, and it turned out they had both been on the the same vessel, though they traveled in different classes.

Imagine my surprise days later when I was out picking figs in my front yard and thought I saw an odd leaf dangling from a branch. Looking closer, I realized it was a butterfly. The undersides of its wings were a mottled gray and brown that offered excellent camouflage in terms of looking like a dead leaf (though maybe not so effective in a lush green tree).

When the butterfly opened its wings, I saw the brilliant black with white dots and a splattered red stripe on the back. A Vanessa atalanta. It hung upside down from the fat end of an overripe fig, where nectar was dripping out. I’d never seen one in person before.

When I sat down to write this, I looked up the piece from the Washington Post I’d seen back in 2008 about the reporter that had befriended a Vanessa atalanta. What I found first instead was another article from him written just a few years ago, saying that everywhere he went, Vanessa atalantas seemed to find him and land on him—not only in the District, where he had his first meeting, but also at his home in Maryland every year, and also in New York and Minnesota. His wife seemed to notice them first, but he was the one to whom they came, on whom they landed.

He didn’t seem to ascribe the kind of greater plan behind it all that many people would be tempted to hypothesize, but he was clearly moved by the encounters. The last visit he described in the article had happened in 2019. He’d been distracted in his garden, suddenly carried back to a slaughter he’d witnessed as a reporter in Vietnam—the aftermath of a North Vietnamese bomb that had hit a village. There were, as far as he could see, no survivors.

He’s never been able to shake the memory. Not long after the image of carnage rattled him once again, another Vanessa atalanta appeared.

“Was it trying to tell me something?” he wrote. “Who can say? In the end, I’m left with a feeling of gratitude.”

If we can’t escape the worst of our past, or even the worst of the present, the better parts of them will remain with us, too. Grim as this point may be, everything is never lost. The past is carried forward as the seed of the next revelation, encompassing both the horrors and the wonders.

Your paid subscriptions support my work.