Nirvana, Nevada, Vaniada. By the way, should I not add, my
	Ada, that only at the very last interview with poor dummy-
	mummy, soon after my premature—I mean, premonitory—
	nightmare about, “You can, Sir,” she employed mon petit nom,
583.05	Vanya, Vanyusha—never had before, and it sounded so odd,
	so tend... (voice trailing off, radiators tinkling).
	“Dummy-mum”—(laughing). “Angels, too, have brooms—
	to sweep one’s soul clear of horrible images. My black nurse
	was Swiss-laced with white whimsies.”
583.10	Sudden ice hurtling down the rain pipe: brokenhearted sta-
	lactite.
	Recorded and replayed in their joint memory was their
	early preoccupation with the strange idea of death. There is
	one exchange that it would be nice to enact against the green
583.15	moving backdrop of one of our Ardis sets. The talk about
	“double guarantee” in eternity. Start just before that.
	“I know there’s a Van in Nirvana. I’ll be with him in the
	depths moego ada, of my Hades,” said Ada.
	“True, true” (bird-effects here, and acquiescing branches,
583.20	and what you used to call “golden gouts”).
	“As lovers and siblings,” she cried, “we have a double chance

[ 583 ]

	of being together in eternity, in terrarity. Four pairs of eyes
	in paradise!”
	“Neat, neat,” said Van.
	Something of the sort. One great difficulty. The strange
584.05	mirage-shimmer standing in for death should not appear too
	soon in the chronicle and yet it should permeate the first amorous
	scenes. Hard but not insurmountable (I can do anything, I can
	tango and tap-dance on my fantastic hands). By the way, who
	dies first?
584.10	Ada. Van. Ada. Vaniada. Nobody. Each hoped to go first,
	so as to concede, by implication, a longer life to the other, and
	each wished to go last, in order to spare the other the anguish,
	or worries, of widowhood. One solution would be for you to
	marry Violet.
584.15	“Thank you. J’ai tâté de deux tribades dans ma vie, ça suffit.
	Dear Emile says ‘terme qu’on évite d’employer.’ How right he is!”
	“If not Violet, then a local Gauguin girl. Or Yolande Kick-
	shaw.”
	Why? Good question. Anyway. Violet must not be given
584.20	this part to type. I’m afraid we’re going to wound a lot of
	people (openwork American lilt)! Oh come, art cannot hurt.
	It can, and how!
	Actually the question of mortal precedence has now hardly
	any importance. I mean, the hero and heroine should get so
584.25	close to each other by the time the horror begins, so organically
	close, that they overlap, intergrade, interache, and even if
	Vaniada’s end is described in the epilogue we, writers and
	readers, should be unable to make out (myopic, myopic) who
	exactly survives, Dava or Vada, Anda or Vanda.
584.30	I had a schoolmate called Vanda. And I knew a girl called
	Adora, little thing in my last floramor. What makes me see
	that bit as the purest sanglot in the book? What is the worst
	part of dying?

[ 584 ]

	For you realize there are three facets to it (roughly corre-
	sponding to the popular tripartition of Time). There is, first,
	the wrench of relinquishing forever all one’s memories—that’s
	a commonplace, but what courage man must have had to go
585.05	through that commonplace again and again and not give up
	the rigmarole of accumulating again and again the riches of
	consciousness that will be snatched away! Then we have the
	second facet—the hideous physical pain—for obvious reasons
	let us not dwell upon that. And finally, there is the featureless
585.10	pseudo-future, blank and black, an everlasting nonlastingness,
	the crowning paradox of our boxed brain’s eschatologies!
	“Yes,” said Ada (aged eleven and a great hair-tosser), “yes
	—but take a paralytic who forgets the entire past gradually,
	stroke by stroke, who dies in his sleep like a good boy, and
585.15	who has believed all his life that the soul is immortal—isn’t that
	desirable, isn’t that a quite comfortable arrangement?”
	“Cold comfort,” said Van (aged fourteen and dying of other
	desires). “You lose your immortality when you lose your mem-
	ory. And if you land then on Terra Caelestis, with your pillow
585.20	and chamberpot, you are made to room not with Shakespeare
	or even Longfellow, but with guitarists and cretins.”
	She insisted that if there were no future, then one had the
	right of making up a future, and in that case one’s very own
	future did exist, insofar as one existed oneself. Eighty years
585.25	quickly passed—a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern.
	They had spent most of the morning reworking their transla-
	tion of a passage (lines 569–572) in John Shade’s famous poem:
	...Sovetï mï dayom
	Kak bït’ vdovtsu: on poteryal dvuh zhyon;
585.30	On ih vstrechaet—lyubyashchih, lyubimïh,
	Revnuyushchih ego drug k druzhke...
	(...We give advice
	To widower. He has been married twice:

[ 585 ]

	He meets his wives, both loved, both loving, both
	Jealous of one another...)
	Van pointed out that here was the rub—one is free to
	imagine any type of hereafter, of course: the generalized para-
586.05	dise promised by Oriental prophets and poets, or an individual
	combination; but the work of fancy is handicapped—to a quite
	hopeless extent—by a logical ban: you cannot bring your friends
	along—or your enemies for that matter—to the party. The
	transposition of all our remembered relationships into an Elysian
586.10	life inevitably turns it into a second-rate continuation of our
	marvelous mortality. Only a Chinaman or a retarded child
	can imagine being met, in that Next-Installment World, to the
	accompaniment of all sorts of tail-wagging and groveling of
	welcome, by the mosquito executed eighty years ago upon one’s
586.15	bare leg, which has been amputated since then and now, in the
	wake of the gesticulating mosquito, comes back, stomp, stomp,
	stomp, here I am, stick me on.
	She did not laugh; she repeated to herself the verses that
	had given them such trouble. The Signy brain-shrinkers would
586.20	gleefully claim that the reason the three “boths” had been
	skipped in the Russian version was not at all, oh, not at all,
	because cramming three cumbersome amphibrachs into the
	pentameter would have necessitated adding at least one more
	verse for carrying the luggage.
586.25	“Oh, Van, oh Van, we did not love her enough. That’s
	whom you should have married, the one sitting feet up, in
	ballerina black, on the stone balustrade, and then everything
	would have been all right—I would have stayed with you both
	in Ardis Hall, and instead of that happiness, handed out gratis,
586.30	instead of all that we teased her to death!”
	Was it time for the morphine? No, not yet. Time-and-pain
	had not been mentioned in the Texture. Pity, since an element
	of pure time enters into pain, into the thick, steady, solid dura-

[ 586 ]

	tion of I-can’t-bear-it pain; nothing gray-gauzy about it, solid
	as a black bole, I can’t, oh, call Lagosse.
	Van found him reading in the serene garden. The doctor
	followed Ada into the house. The Veens had believed for a
587.05	whole summer of misery (or made each other believe) that it
	was a touch of neuralgia.
	Touch? A giant, with an effort-contorted face, clamping and
	twisting an engine of agony. Rather humiliating that physical
	pain makes one supremely indifferent to such moral issues as
587.10	Lucette’s fate, and rather amusing, if that is the right word,
	to constate that one bothers about problems of style even at
	those atrocious moments. The Swiss doctor, who had been
	told everything (and had even turned out to have known at
	medical school a nephew of Dr. Lapiner) displayed an intense
587.15	interest in the almost completed but only partly corrected book
	and drolly said it was not a person or persons but le bouquin
	which he wanted to see guéri de tous ces accrocs before it was
	too late. It was. What everybody thought would be Violet’s
	supreme achievement, ideally clean, produced on special Atticus
587.20	paper in a special cursive type (the glorified version of Van’s
	hand), with the master copy bound in purple calf for Van’s
	ninety-seventh birthday, had been immediately blotted out by
	a regular inferno of alterations in red ink and blue pencil. One
	can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever
587.25	intended to die they would die, as it were, into the finished
	book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the
	poetry of its blurb.
	Their recently built castle in Ex was inset in a crystal winter.
	In the latest Who’s Who the list of his main papers included
587.30	by some bizarre mistake the title of a work he had never written,
	though planned to write many pains: Unconsciousness and the
	Unconscious. There was no pain to do it now—and it was high
	pain for Ada to be completed. “Quel livre, mon Dieu, mon
	Dieu,” Dr. [Professor. Ed.] Lagosse exclaimed, weighing the

[ 587 ]

	master copy which the flat pale parents of the future Babes,
	in the brown-leaf Woods, a little book in the Ardis Hall nursery,
	could no longer prop up in the mysterious first picture: two
	people in one bed.
588.05	Ardis Hall—the Ardors and Arbors of Ardis—this is the
	leitmotiv rippling through Ada, an ample and delightful chron-
	icle, whose principal part is staged in a dream-bright America—
	for are not our childhood memories comparable to Vineland-
	born caravelles, indolently encircled by the white birds of
588.10	dreams? The protagonist, a scion of one of our most illustrious
	and opulent families, is Dr. Van Veen, son of Baron “Demon”
	Veen, that memorable Manhattan and Reno figure. The end
	of an extraordinary epoch coincides with Van’s no less extraor-
	dinary boyhood. Nothing in world literature, save maybe Count
588.15	Tolstoy’s reminiscences, can vie in pure joyousness and Ar-
	cadian innocence with the “Ardis” part of the book. On the
	fabulous country estate of his art-collecting uncle, Daniel Veen,
	an ardent childhood romance develops in a series of fascinating
	scenes between Van and pretty Ada, a truly unusual gamine,
588.20	daughter of Marina, Daniel’s stage-struck wife. That the rela-
	tionship is not simply dangerous cousinage, but possesses an as-
	pect prohibited by law, is hinted in the very first pages.
	In spite of the many intricacies of plot and psychology, the
	story proceeds at a spanking pace. Before we can pause to take
588.25	breath and quietly survey the new surroundings into which the
	writer’s magic carpet has, as it were, spilled us, another attractive
	girl, Lucette Veen, Marina’s younger daughter, has also been
	swept off her feet by Van, the irresistible rake. Her tragic
	destiny constitutes one of the highlights of this delightful book.
588.30	The rest of Van’s story turns frankly and colorfully upon his
	long love-affair with Ada. It is interrupted by her marriage to
	an Arizonian cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered
	our country. After her husband’s death our lovers are reunited.
	They spend their old age traveling together and dwelling in

[ 588 ]

	the various villas, one lovelier than another, that Van has erected
	all over the Western Hemisphere.
	Not the least adornment of the chronicle is the delicacy of
	pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a painted ceiling; a pretty
589.05	plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots of a brook; butter-
	flies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance; a misty
	view descried from marble steps; a doe at gaze in the ancestral
	park; and much, much more.

[ 589 ]