Nabokov's Butterflies.

Things come together, as always.  This week, we'll throw bioinformatics, Russian literature, and butterflies into the stew.  You're skeptical, I know, but it will taste delicious.

It’s just beyond my reach, suspended perfectly in a two inch space behind the glass. My fingertips have traced the edges of the box’s thin, wooden frame, but they've never reached its tiny captive. I don’t know what it would feel like. Flimsy, probably –or maybe those silken wings are stronger than they look? The intricacy of the butterfly led me to keep it, even though the ambiguity of its body behind the glass occasionally frustrates me. In some ways, I can’t help it; my personality is driven by a commanding fascination for finer points. For that reason, my favorite hobbies accommodate details. Also for that reason, I love to write.

I learned to love writing through the words of those who had loved it before me. It was difficult to choose because I loved them all, but I had a favorite few. They were from Nabokov’s Lolita. 

“My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lighting) when I was three...”

            I liked the brief, sudden break of the parentheses. I loved the precision of his words. But mostly, I loved the detail. There was a lot to learn from Nabokov, but his teachings were not the first to stick with me.  Science, with its carefully constructed methods, had always seemed to be the most appropriate direction for my interests. I wanted to be a scientist, but I also worried that becoming one would mean sacrificing creative writing. For a long time, I struggled to reconcile the two fields as if they were mutually exclusive.But Nabokov was stubborn, sitting dormant in my mind for years.

            Vladmir Nabokov, as it turns out, was also a lepidopterist –a self-taught authority on butterflies. The Russian Revolution had forced the young boy and his family into exile, dashing Nabokov’s former vision of becoming a full-time specialist on the colorful insects. Obviously, he later found a place as a successful writer. What struck me, however, was that he never fully relinquished his scientific curiosity. In America, he spent hours meticulously examining butterfly specimens beneath a microscope in hopes of sorting out a hypothesis for their evolution. The insight from his experiments led him to form an unpopular explanation that was ultimately rejected by most of his peers. Incredibly, his model has very recently been proven via modern bioinformatics technology. An article from The New York Times about it now hangs on the wall near my bookshelf. 

            I was thrilled at the idea that someone had made such an impact on the two distinct fields of science and literature. Maybe he was just particularly gifted with two unique abilities, but I don't think so. There has to be more to it than that, a reason that he succeeded in each. It was not that his talents were independent of each other. Rather, they shared a common fuel. He took advantage of details and the perseverance and creativity in finding them. The scientist who used genetic sequences of Nabokov’s butterflies to validate his theories from sixty years ago didn’t write the interesting articles in this week’s newspapers, and the journalists who did likely did not understand the published research findings. But a mastery of detail lies at the heart of the two works. Each side of the divide between science and the humanities needs the other, and a person lucky enough to find himself spanning both should not perceive a dilemma in his position. It’s just the opposite; he has a vantage point that many aim to reach but few actually do. Nabokov, once an occupant of this space himself, might have shown me how to get there.